Of key predictors of religious disbelief, witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment was the most potent, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, & less advanced mentalizing

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach. Will M. Gervais, Maxine B. Najle, Nava Caluori. Social Psychological and Personality Science, March 5, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550621994001

Abstract: Widespread religious disbelief represents a key testing ground for theories of religion. We evaluated the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches—secularization, cognitive byproduct, and dual inheritance—in a nationally representative (United States, N = 1,417) data set with preregistered analyses and found considerable support for the dual inheritance perspective. Of key predictors of religious disbelief, witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment was the most potent, β = .28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β = .13, and less advanced mentalizing, β = .05. Low cultural exposure predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection, and cognitive reflection only predicted disbelief among those relatively low in cultural exposure to religion. This highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and transmitted culture and emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning in the cultural transmission of disbelief (preprint https://psyarxiv.com/e29rt/).

Keywords: atheism, religion, culture, evolution, dual inheritance theory

Discussion

Summary

Overall, this study is one of the most comprehensive available analyses of the cognitive, cultural, and motivational factors that predict individual differences in religious belief and disbelief (see also Willard & Cingl, 2017). Consistent patterns emerged, suggesting that lack of exposure to CREDs of religious faith is a key predictor of atheism. Once this context-biased cultural learning mechanism is accounted for, reflective cognitive style predicts some people being slightly more prone to religious disbelief than their cultural upbringing might otherwise suggest. That said, this relationship was relatively modest. Advanced mentalizing was a robust but weak predictor of religious belief, and existential security did not meaningfully predict disbelief. This overall pattern of results closely matched predictions of a dual inheritance approach but is difficult to reconcile with other prominent theoretical approaches (see Table 1 and Figure 2). These results speak directly to competing for theoretical perspectives on the origins of religious disbelief culled from sociology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science of religion, cultural evolution, and gene–culture coevolution.

Alternatives and Limitations

Of the four primary atheism predictors that we used to test prominent theories, religious CREDs emerged as a clear empirical winner. In some ways, however, our tests may have been methodologically stacked in this variable’s favor. Like the self-reports of religious disbelief, this measure includes self-report items about religious upbringing. Thus, there is shared method variance associated with this predictor that is less evident for others. Also, although the CREDs–atheism relationship is consistent with a cultural transmission framework, heritability of religiosity may also contribute to atheists coming from families who aren’t visibly religious. The measure we used is unable to resolve this. Further, our various key predictors varied in both reliability and demonstrated validity. We chose these measures simply because they have been used in previous research; that said, previous use does not necessarily imply that the measures were sufficient.

As with measurement quality, sample diversity is a recurrent concern in psychological research (Henrich et al., 2010; Rad et al., 2018; Saab et al., 2020). Most psychology research nowadays emerges from convenience samples of undergraduates and Mechanical Turk workers. These samples are fine for some purposes, quite limited for others (Gaither, 2019), and are known to depart from representativeness (Callegaro et al., 2014; MacInnis et al., 2018). While our nationally representative sampling allows us to generalize beyond samples, we can access for free (in lab) or cheap (MTurk), even a large nationally representative sample barely scratches the surface of human diversity (Henrich et al., 2010; Rad et al., 2018; Saab et al., 2020). As such, we encourage similar analyses across different cultures (Willard & Cingl, 2017). Diversifying the samples that make up the empirical portfolio of evolutionary approaches to religion is especially necessary because cultural cues themselves emerged as the strongest predictor of disbelief in this and related work (Gervais & Najle, 2015; Gervais et al., 2018; Maij et al., 2017; Willard & Cingl, 2017). Without diverse samples, including and especially extending well beyond nationally representative samples in the United States, researchers can only aspire to ever more precisely answer a mere outlier of an outlier of our most important scientific questions about human nature.

We measured and tested predictors of religious belief and disbelief. This outcome measure is quite narrow in scope, in terms of the broader construct of religiosity. Further, our Supernatural Belief Scale—while it has been used across cultures—is fairly Judeo-Christian-centric. We suspect that a broader consideration of religiosity in diverse societies may yield different patterns. The Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) people problem isn’t just a sampling issue; it also reflects an overreliance on the theories, constructs, and instruments developed by WEIRD researchers to test their weird hunches.

Although it is not featured in any of the core theoretical perspectives we evaluated, social liberalism was consistently the strongest covariate of religious disbelief. The intersection of religious and political ideology is an interesting topic in its own right and merits further consideration. Interestingly, disbelief if anything was associated with fiscal conservatism in this sample. This suggests that simple “believers are conservative” tropes are oversimplifications. Ideology and religiosity are multifaceted and dissociable, but certainly of interest given rampant political polarization in the United States and elsewhere. That said, religion–ideology associations, whatever they may be, are largely orthogonal to existing cultural and evolutionary theories of religious belief and disbelief.

Theoretical Implications

We simultaneously evaluated predictions about the origins of disbelief from three prominent theoretical perspectives: secularization, cognitive byproduct, and dual inheritance. Comparing the predictions in Table 1 with the results of Figure 2, results were most consistent with the dual inheritance perspective, the only theoretical perspective that predicted prominent roles for both inCREDulous atheism and analytic atheism. Given the primacy of cultural learning in our data, any model that does not rely heavily on context-biased cultural learning is likely a poor fit for explaining the origins of religious disbelief. By extension, such theoretical models are necessarily incomplete or faulty evolutionary accounts of religion. Simply growing up in a home with relatively fewer credible displays of faith predicted disbelief, contra prior assertions from the cognitive science of religion that disbelief results from “special cultural conditions” and “a good degree of cultural scaffolding” (Barrett, 2010).

Analytic atheism is probably the most discussed avenue to disbelief in the literature (Pennycook et al., 2016; Shenhav et al., 2012) and broader culture (Dawkins, 2006). Although in this sample, there was consistent evidence of analytic atheism, the overall trend was modest, the trend itself varied considerably across exposure to CREDs, and sufficient religious CREDs buffered believers against the putatively corrosive influence of reflective cognition on faith. Despite claims that atheism generally requires cognitive effort or reflection (Barrett, 2010; Boyer, 2008), cognitive reflection was only modestly related to atheism in these data. These results, taken alongside other evidence accumulating from similar studies (Farias et al., 2017; Gervais et al., 2018; Willard & Cingl, 2017), may suggest that early claims surrounding the primacy of effortful cognitive reflection as a necessary predictor of atheism may have been overenthusiastic. Analytic thinking predicts atheism in some contexts but is far from primary.

It is initially puzzling that existential security proved largely impotent in our analyses, as it appears to be an important factor in explaining cross-cultural differences in religiosity (Barber, 2013; Inglehart & Norris, 2004; Solt et al., 2011). It is possible that our analyses were at the wrong level of analysis to capture the influence of existential security, which may act as a precursor to other cultural forces. There may actually be a two-stage generational process whereby existential security demotivates religious behavior in one generation, leading the subsequent generation to atheism as they do not witness CREDs of faith. This longitudinal societal prediction merits future investigation.

Finally, this work has implications beyond religion. Presumably, many beliefs arise from an interaction between core cognitive faculties, motivation, cultural exposure, and cognitive style. The general dual inheritance framework adopted here may prove fruitful for other sorts of beliefs elsewhere. Indeed, a thorough exploration of the degree to which different beliefs are predicted by cultural exposure relative to other cognitive factors may be useful for exploring content- versus context-biased cultural learning and the contributions of transmitted and evoked culture. As this is a prominent point of contention between different schools of human evolutionary thought (Laland & Brown, 2011), such as evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, further targeted investigation may be productive.

Coda

The importance of transmitted culture and context-biased cultural learning as a predictor of belief and disbelief cannot be overstated. Combined, this work suggests that if you are guessing whether or not individuals are believers or atheists, you are better-off knowing how their parents behaved—Did they tithe? Pray regularly? Attend synagogue?—than how they themselves process information. Further, our interaction analyses suggest that sufficiently strong cultural exposure yields sustained religious commitment even in the face of the putatively corrosive influence of cognitive reflection. Theoretically, these results fit well within a dual inheritance approach, as evolved cognitive capacities for cultural learning prove to be the most potent predictor of individual differences in the cross-culturally canalized expression of religious belief. Atheists are becoming increasingly common in the world, not because human psychology is fundamentally changing but rather because evolved cognition remains fairly stable in the face of a rapidly changing cultural context that is itself the product of a coevolutionary process. Faith emerges in some cultural contexts, and atheism is the natural result in others.

Authors’ Note