Pro-Environmental Beliefs Are Less Likely To Lead To Action Among Those Who Believe In A Controlling God

By Emma Young

We all know that it’s vital that we take action to reduce the harm we do to the environment. So understanding the barriers to such action is critical, too. A new paper, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, identifies a potentially important one: when people believe that it’s important to protect the environment, they’re less likely to act on those beliefs if they’re more religious.



Kimin Eom at Singapore Management University and colleagues studied Americans — and when they talk about people being “religious”, they’re really talking about being Christian. These caveats are important to highlight up front.

In the first of three studies, the team analysed pre-existing data on a nationally representative sample of 3,052 US adults. They looked specifically at answers to three categories of questions. Firstly, questions assessed how strongly an individual endorsed the ideas that a) the world is getting hotter; and b) human activity is an important driver of this. Secondly, questions related to “religiosity” — a) their belief in the importance of religion; and b) how often they attend religious services. Finally, the team looked at responses to questions that assessed their level of support for pro-environmental policies.

The researchers found that climate change beliefs predicted support for pro-environmental policy less strongly among individuals higher in religiosity. In other words, “These results supported the idea that environmental beliefs are less in line with pro-environmental support among those who are more, relative to less, religious.” These results held even when team took into account/controlled for a range of demographic variables, including political orientation, gender, income, education, age and ethnicity.

In a second study, the team dug deeper into this finding. A total of 424 US students, half from a Christian college and half from a non-religious public university, both in California, completed a series of questionnaires. The first scale explored the extent to which they believed in climate change. The second measured religiosity. The third measured how strongly the participants believed in a “controlling god” — a god who has a plan and controls events in the world. They were then asked to report how often they would perform six environmentally friendly behaviours (such as buying green products instead of regular products and unplugging appliances at night) over the next six months.

The participants also gave demographic data — and a few potentially important differences between the groups stood out. Namely, the Christian college students were more likely to be Republican and there were fewer women in the Christian group. The team took these group differences into account in their analysis, which revealed that higher religiosity was associated with a stronger belief in a controlling god — and it was the strength of this belief (rather than religiosity per se) that affected their intentions to act in a more environmentally friendly way. (Those with the strongest beliefs in a controlling god were the least likely to indicate that they’d be engaging in such behaviours.)

Why should this be the case? The authors argue that, if you believe that a god controls what happens in the world, you are less likely to think that any actions that you take will change any given outcome — and so you are less likely to change your behaviour.

The results from these studies were correlational, however. To explore the idea that belief in a controlling god makes people less likely to act to help the environment, the team ran a third study with 730 Christians. The team measured their environmental beliefs as before. Half then read a passage that described God as the ultimate controller of the world. This was designed to prime them with the idea that God is controlling. The other read an article about why Pluto had been declassified as a planet (a text chosen to have no influence on attitudes to God). Participants also rated the extent to which four adjectives (controlling, commanding, caring, compassionate ) described a god. Next, their intentions to behave in a pro-environmental way were assessed (as in the previous study) and they provided demographic data.

Climate change beliefs predicted intentions to behave pro-environmentally less strongly when a participant had a stronger concept of God as being controlling. Or to put it another way, believing in a controlling god “weakens the association between environmental beliefs and pro-environmental support”. This study confirms that it’s the belief in a controlling god, rather than a belief in God per se, that weakens that association, the team argues.

As already noted, though, the religious people in this study were Christians, and they were all American. So the findings may or may not extend to people with other religious beliefs. Also, these studies featured a lot of self-report and assessments of “intention” to act. It would of course be interesting to know whether belief in a controlling god makes any difference to actual, real world behaviour.

However, as the researchers also point out, when it comes to understanding which sociocultural factors influence environmental attitudes and behaviour, there is still a lot to learn. This work at least starts to plug part of that gap.




SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/09/23/pro-environmental-beliefs-are-less-likely-to-lead-to-action-among-those-who-believe-in-a-controlling-god/#more-40369(accessed 23.9.20)

People Who Have Lost Their Religion Show “Residues” Of Religious Past In Their Thoughts And Behaviours, Study Claims

By Emma Young

What happens to people when they lose their religion? Do they start to think and act just like people who have never believed — or do they keep some psychological and behavioural traces of their past?

Given the number of people worldwide who report no current religious affiliation (more than 1 billion) and predictions that this will expand into the future, it’s important to explore just how homogenous, or otherwise, this group is, argue the researchers behind a new paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences.

Daryl R. Van Tongeren at Hope College, US, and his colleagues conclude from their studies that there is in fact a “religious residue” that clings to people who cease to identify as religious. “Formerly religious individuals differed from never religious and currently religious individuals in cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes,” the team reports.

Why might such a residue exist? Because for people who are religious, the kinds of attitudes and behaviours that go along with religion are likely to be important to the way those individuals see themselves. Picture someone who grew up in a strongly Christian household, for example, with parents who promoted Christian morals, and who volunteered their time through the church. Even if that person later no longer identifies as Christian, these experiences may have enduring psychological impacts. Our social identities can change, the researchers note, but this usually only happens slowly.

For their first study, the team recruited just over 3,000 nationally representative online participants from the US, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. These people were asked about their religious identity, beliefs and practices, and the extent to which they were exposed to religious behaviours during childhood. Then they completed a (very brief) measure of their subjective prosociality (their perception of their helpfulness towards other people, for example), a scale that measured their social values, and also a test that assessed their attitudes towards God.

The team found that a sizeable proportion — 20.94% — of the participants reported being formerly religious. And, they argue, their data revealed evidence for a religious residue effect. On various measures, including religiosity, self-reported prosociality and prosocial orientation (such as wanting everyone in a group to do well, rather than aiming for individual success), currently religious participants scored the highest, followed by formerly religious and finally never religious people. This was true for each of the three nationalities sampled.

To explore this further, the team ran a second study on 1,626 men and women from the same countries. This time, there were equivalent numbers of never-religious, formerly religious and currently religious participants. And as well as repeating the steps in the first study, these people were given the option of donating a percentage of their participation payment to Save the Children, and also of volunteering to complete another short survey (they could offer anything between 5 and 15 minutes of their time).

Among those who agreed to volunteer for the extra survey, the currently religious gave up more time than both the other groups. Currently religious people also donated more of their money to charity than formerly religious people — but this group in turn donated more than the never religious. This shows that formerly religious people don’t just say they are more prosocial but act in a more prosocial way than never-religious types, the team says.

Well, this particular study seems to show that. But, remember, the participants in both these studies were all first asked about their religious identity. If, as the researchers argue, being prosocial is an important element of being religious, then currently religious, and even previously religious, participants had all just been primed to think of religion, and (whether consciously or not) everything that goes with that. Van Tongeren maintains that as the participants were asked a host of different questions, this is unlikely to be an issue. But I don’t think they can rule out the possibility that this inflated these groups’ prosociality scores.

For the final study, the team shifted to data from New Zealand collected between 2009 and 2017 as part of an annual, longitudinal national sample of registered voters. This revealed that volunteering was about twice as common among religious vs non-religious people. It also showed that the annual chance of a participant losing their religion but still spending time in voluntary or charitable work was much higher than the chance of someone losing their religion and stopping volunteering. This supports the religious residue hypothesis, the researchers argue.

But plenty of non-religious people also volunteered their time. Being the kind of person who volunteers could constitute an important aspect of anyone’s social identity, in and of itself, and so be resistant to change, whether you are religious or not. However, Van Tongeren maintains that the data provides evidence for the “lingering effects of prosociality, even after people stop identifying as religious”.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/05/07/people-who-have-lost-their-religion-show-residues-of-religious-past-in-their-thoughts-and-behaviours-study-claims/#more-39578(accessed 10.5.20)

The children of securely attached mothers think that God is close

Children's sense of God's closeness is apparently related, not to their mother's religiosity, but to their mother's attachment style - that is, whether the mother is calm and confident in her relationships or anxious and uncertain. Specifically, Rosalinda Cassibba and her colleagues have shown that the children of securely attached mothers (religious or not) tend to think that God is closer, as compared with the children of insecurely attached mothers.

The new finding builds on claims made last century by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby that attachment style is transmitted from generation to generation (via non-genetic means). The new result suggests that a mother's attachment style affects the kind of attachment her child forms not just with her, but with other potential caring figures, even non-corporeal ones.

Seventy-one Italian mothers were classified as having a secure or insecure attachment style based on a short interview. They also answered questions about their religious faith and attachment to God. Meanwhile, their children (average age 7; 29 boys, 42 girls) were presented with a felt board depicting a child and were told six stories involving that child: some were neutral (e.g. he sits at a table and reads), others were more distressing (e.g. his dog died). For each story, the children were asked to place a felt character to show where God was located. The children were able to choose from 10 possible felt figures to represent God - most chose a man or a heart.

The children of securely attached mothers tended to place God nearer to the child in both the neutral and distressing stories. By contrast, the children's placement of God was unrelated to their mother's religiosity. Cassibba and her colleagues aren't certain of the mechanism underlying the relationship between mothers' attachment and children's sense of God's closeness, but they think it probably has to do with the mothers' care-giving style, or possibly a personality style shared with the parent. 

The study has a number of short-comings including the fact that the children were locating God's closeness to a fictional child, not to themselves. Also, we don't know how specific this is - would they, for instance, have located a child's teddy bear as nearer? Notwithstanding these issues, the researchers said their finding "is important both for attachment research in developmental psychology and the psychology of religion."

Somewhat strangely for an article published in a psychology journal, Cassibba and her colleagues ended with the following advice for the pious: "A caregiver who desires his or her children to come to view God as a close relational partner may do well in placing a high priority on the children's own needs for support and closeness. The caregiver's implicit teachings about relationships is likely to be far more important than his or her explicit preaching about God."

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SOURCE:

RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Cassibba R, Granqvist P, and Costantini A (2013). Mothers' attachment security predicts their children's sense of God's closeness. Attachment and human development, 15 (1), 51-64 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23216392

Author weblinks: http://www.fasf.uniba.it/area_pubblica/dettaglio_docente.php?id=42

Paranormal believers and religious people are more prone to seeing illusory faces

Our brains are so adept at detecting faces that we often see them in random patterns, such as clouds or the gnarled bark of a tree. Occasionally one of these illusory faces comes along that resembles a celebrity and the story ends up in the news - like when Michael Jackson's face appeared on the surface of a piece of toast. A new study asks whether some people are more prone than others to perceiving these illusory faces.

Tapani Riekki and his team collected dozens of photos that judges in pilot work agreed did or did not have the appearance of faces in them (this included pictures of furniture, places, and natural scenes, such as a rock-face). The researchers then used two adverts to recruit their participants - they were identical except that one requested people who "view the paranormal positively or believe that there is an invisible spiritual world," while the other requested people who are "sceptical about paranormal phenomena".

Forty-seven people were eventually selected to take part, based on their being particularly paranormal-believing, religious, sceptical or atheist (there was a lot of overlap in membership between the first two and final two categories). The participants were shown the photos and had to indicate whether a "face-like area" was present, where it was in the image, and they had to say how face-like the image was, and how emotional.

The key finding is that people who scored high in paranormal belief or religiosity were more likely to see face-like areas in the pictures compared with the sceptics and atheists. They weren't more sensitive to the illusory faces as such, because they also scored a lot of false alarms - saying there was a face when there wasn't. However, when they spotted a face-like pattern correctly, they were more accurate than sceptics and atheists at saying where exactly in the pictures the illusory faces were located. Finally, the paranormal believers rated the illusory faces as more face-like and emotional than the sceptics.

The researchers said their findings are consistent with past research showing that belief in the paranormal tends to go hand-in-hand with a tendency to jump to conclusions based on inadequate evidence. They added that the results support the idea that religious people and paranormal believers have the habit of seeing human-like attributes, including mental states, in "inappropriate realms."

"We may all be biased to perceive human characteristics where none exist," Riekki and his team concluded, "but religious and paranormal believers perceive them even more than do others."
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SOURCE:

 RESEARCH DIGEST : http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Riekki, T., Lindeman, M., Aleneff, M., Halme, A., and Nuortimo, A. (2012). Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.2874
Author weblink: http://www.psyko.helsinki.fi/psyko/Psykolog.nsf/Personnel/RiekkiTapani?OpenDocument