Abstract: Religion is a core feature of human nature, yet a comprehensive evolutionary approach toreligion must account for religious disbelief. Despite potentially drastic overreporting of religiosity[1], a third of the world’s 7+ billion human inhabitants may actually be atheists—merely people who do not believe in God or gods. The origins of disbelief thus present a key testing ground for theories of religion. Here, we evaluate the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches to the origins of disbelief, and find considerable support for dual inheritance (gene-culture coevolution) approach. This dual inheritance model[2,3] derives from distinct literatures addressing the putative 1) core social cognitive faculties that enable mental representation of gods[4–7], 2) the challenges to existential security that motivate people to treat some god candidates as real and strategically important[8,9], 3) evolved cultural learning processes that influence which god candidates naïve learners treat as real rather than imaginary[3,10–12], and4) the intuitive processes that sustain belief in gods[13–15] and the cognitive reflection that may sometimes undermine it[16–18]. We explore the varied origins of religious disbelief by analyzing these pathways simultaneously in a large nationally representative (USA, N= 1417) dataset with preregistered analyses. Combined, we find that witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment is the most potent predictor of religious disbelief, β=0.28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β= 0.13, and less advanced mentalizing, β= 0.05. Low cultural exposure to faith predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection. Further, cognitive reflection predicted reduced religious belief only among individuals who witness relatively fewer credible contextual cues of faith in others. This work empirically unites four distinct literatures addressing the origins of religious disbelief, highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and cultural evolutionary processes in religious transmission, emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning[19], and sheds light on the shared psychological mechanisms that underpin both religious belief and disbelief.
Factors Predicting Religious (Dis)belief
To assess the four different factors that may drive religious disbelief, we measured participants’ mentalizing abilities, feelings of existential security, exposure to credible cues of religiosity (CREDs), and reflective versus intuitive cognitive style.
We measured advanced mentalizing abilities, which correspond to mindblind atheism, using the Perspective Taking 293 Subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index75. This measure includes items like “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision” and “Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place,” measured on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). This scale reached an acceptable level of reliability, α = 0.77, M = 4.79, SD = 0.78. We measured feelings of existential security, which corresponds to apatheism, with a number of items assessing concerns that are salient to participants and participant faith in institutions like the government, health care, and social security to provide aid in the face of need44. Items about the salience of different concerns included questions about how often participants worry about losing their job, worry about having enough money in the future, and feel they cannot afford things that are necessary. These items were assessed on a scale from 1 (never) to 4 (all the time). Illustrative items regarding faith in institutions include “How much do you feel confident in our country’s social security system” and “How much do you feel that people who start out poor can become wealthy if they work hard enough,” assessed on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (a lot). Items measuring faith in institutions were reverse-scored, and all items were averaged together to form a composite index of existential insecurity (α = 0.77, M = 2.2, SD = 0.39), with higher scores reflecting more insecurity.
We measured cognitive reflection, which corresponds to analytic atheism, using nine items from the Cognitive Reflection Test76–78. This measure poses a series of questions to participants that rely on logical reasoning to answer correctly. All have a seemingly simple initial answer, but upon further consideration people arrive at a different (and correct) answer. We therefore measured whether or not participants provided the correct answers to these questions that require more cognitive reflection. If they answered a question correctly, they were given a 1, and if they answered it incorrectly, they were given a 0. Our full index of cognitive reflection is composed of the sum of the number of questions that each participant answered correctly, with a higher score thus indicating a more reflective and analytic cognitive style. The average score was 3.18, with a standard deviation of 2.66. We measured exposure to CREDs, which corresponds to inCREDulous 317 atheism, with the CREDs Scale10.
This scale assesses the extent to which caregivers demonstrated religious behaviors during the respondent’s childhood, such as going to religious services, acting as good religious role models, and making personal sacrifices to religion. The frequency of these types of behaviors was measured on a scale ranging from 1 (never) to 4 (always). This scale was highly reliable, α = 0.93, M = 2.42, SD = 0.84.
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