Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Feb 9, 2012, 4:56 pm
Does a traumatic experience encourage people towards religion, or does it have the opposite effect? In a previous post, I ran through the evidence that Americans who had lost a relative in the 9-11 terrorist attacks tended to become less religious afterwards. So what about a diffe...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Feb 6, 2012, 4:22 pm
Over at About.com, Austin is running the 2012 Readers Choice Awards. Like last year, there are a number of categories, so head on over and nominate your favourite (you have until Feb 15, with voting starting on Feb 22nd). Best Agnostic or Atheist Book of 2011 Best Agnostic or Atheist Blog ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Feb 4, 2012, 5:15 pm
Priming studies (in which you plant thoughts or topics in people's minds without their being aware of it) typically take place in laboratories. But you can get the same effects in the real world too. So, for example, people will vote differently depending on the location of the polling booth (in a C...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 30, 2012, 4:47 pm
One of the big questions about our supernatural instincts is to what degree they are innate, and to what degree they are learned. While there is some evidence that kids are born with a instinctive belief in omniscience beings, other evidence suggests the exact opposite. Here's a new study by A...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 21, 2012, 3:51 pm
A lot of people think that the Muslim world is just fundamentally different from the Christian world. That's the basis for the idea that we're facing a clash of civilisations (a theory put forward by the American political scientist Samuel Huntingdon back in 1993). One aspect of the theory say...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 18, 2012, 4:47 pm
... eyes in their peripheral vision, and they cheat less and condemn more). ... thoughts of god - explicitly, not subliminally. They primed others with thoughts of other people, or nothing in particular. Then they asked them questions about how self- ... down with the God prime! They al...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 13, 2012, 4:29 pm
Long-time readers of this blog may remember a post from 2009 on religion and health. It summarized the findings of nearly 60 studies, and concluded that while going to church seemed to be linked to better health, religious beliefs per se were unimportant. Studies that have been published sinc...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 9, 2012, 4:56 pm
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries a signal across nerve junctions. You might know of it because of its links to Parkinson's disease, but it's actually pretty widespread in the brain and does a number of interesting things. Variants of one particular molecular receptor for...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 5, 2012, 4:54 pm
In a speech just before Christmas, the British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that "We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so." He did go on to accept that it's OK to have a different religion or even no religion at all, but even so it's an interesting turn of phrase. &...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jan 1, 2012, 3:55 pm
So, farewell 2011, and hello 2012! Happy Gregorian New Year, and welcome to the wrap up of all the great science covered in Epiphenom over the past year. Let's start with what we've learned about why people believe. Are we born religious, or do we learn it? This year there was more evidence t...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Dec 26, 2011, 4:04 pm
The Spanish language blog La revolución naturalista has just posted a short written interview with me (in English, although there is a Spanish version). It covers some stuff on the cognitive science of religion, and on why some countries are more religious than others. You can check it out h...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Dec 23, 2011, 5:03 pm
This being the season of good will to all men (at least for those of us with a Christian heritage), it's time to bring a little harmony to the most tumultuous conflict of our times. Yes, I'm talking about the war between 'new' atheists and the religious. When you see these folks slogging it ou...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Dec 19, 2011, 5:00 pm
There's a particular brain wave that gets triggered when you hear stuff that doesn't make sense. It's called the N400, and it's triggered by sentences like "I like my coffee with cream and socks". Although each individual word makes sense, and although the grammar is fine, the sema...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Dec 14, 2011, 4:51 pm
Source What's your poison? Based on some new data from a Czech study, your preferences could speak a lot about your spiritual beliefs. For the study Radmilla Lorencova, at the University of Pardubice in the Czech Republic, interviewed 155 men and women from universities, some kind of club...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Dec 10, 2011, 3:32 pm
I always enjoy analyses of religion done by people whose main research focus lies in other fields. They tend to have quite a refreshing take. So here's a study written by three outsiders. You probably already know Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational (and if you don't, ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 1, 2011, 6:05 pm
According to some new research, your ideas about gods can significantly affect your approach to life. Lead researcher Kristin Laurin (at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada) and colleagues Aaron Kay and Grinne M. Fitzsimons (Duke University) ran a series of priming studies, in which the su...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 28, 2011, 5:43 pm
Eric Kaufmann is a demographer and author of the book "Shall the religious inherit the earth?" Back in 2009 he made some demographic projections for the US and concluded that, by 2050, immigration of religious people and their higher fertility will turn back the tide of secularisation (see Secularis...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 23, 2011, 5:21 pm
By now, most people will have heard the tragic case of Yueyue, the two-year old Chinese girl who was knocked down by two different drivers, lying for 7 minutes before any of the passers-by stopped to help. The case has caused a lot of soul-searching, in China and elsewhere. The best commentary I've ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 17, 2011, 5:00 pm
So, Christians aren't supposed to have sex before marriage (well depending on the variant of God they follow, of course). Just to be sure of it, they have an invisible policeman in the sky watching them at all times to make sure they don't deviate. On the other hand, Christian parents ar...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 12, 2011, 4:45 pm
... have shown that people regard brain-dead individuals as less mentally aware ... who are completely, stone-cold dead. That's weird enough, but ... dead), and the other one dead and buried. For example, David has ... . Bizarrely enough, however, the dead score higher on all of ... min...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 8, 2011, 5:21 pm
Is it ever OK to lie? If they are honest' people would say "yes". After all small lies, done for the greater good, are what lubricates many social interactions. In fact, lying is probably one of the key things that sets us apart from other animals. Of course, lying is also socially destructive...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 4, 2011, 4:58 pm
... are predisposed to all sorts of supernatural concepts. One consequence of ... the kids hardly ever offered up supernatural explanations. Instead, they would say ... the other hand, readily offered up supernatural explanations. There was a clear ... agree that god or other supernatural...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 30, 2011, 5:12 pm
There's always a fair amount of interest in whether atheists are more intelligent than believers. When I've reported on this in the past, I've always been a little sceptical about whether the purported statistical association is meaningful or even real. Well, a new analysis by psyc...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 26, 2011, 4:49 pm
A new paper on the potential links between autism and lack of god-belief has caught the attention of the blogosphere. You can read Razib's take on it over at Gene Expression. Prof Catherine Caldwell-Harris, the psychologist at Boston University, own wrote her own very lucid interpretation of ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 19, 2011, 5:28 pm
One of the arguments given for religion is that it is supposed to promote social cohesion by making people behave better - God, so the theory goes, acts like an invisible policeman living inside your head. It's an intriguing, and intuitive theory, and it's backed up by a few lab experiments. R...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 6, 2011, 5:02 pm
Ever wondered why we get disgusted by things that taste bad and also by things that are morally outrageous? Well, it seems that they really are connected in a very deep way - moral disgust seems to have evolved as an extension of physical disgust. And that means you can play a neat trick: you...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 2, 2011, 5:04 pm
You may have seen in the news recently some reports about a new study with an intriguing finding. Here's the Discovery Channel, for example, telling us that education may not dilute religious beliefs. Hmm. I think they've got their headlines wrong, but it's not entirely the media's fau...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 29, 2011, 4:29 pm
Grief has a complicated relationship with Western religion. On the one hand, loss of a loved one can reinforce beliefs. On the other hand, arbitrary or meaningless deaths could feasibly undermine belief. There hasn't been much investigation into this topic, which is why a new study of the fami...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 24, 2011, 5:44 pm
You may have seen, earlier this month, one of several news reports about how belief in God is great for reducing worries (e.g. here). Well no, that's not really what the study found - the study is actually a bit more precisely focussed than that and a bit more interesting for it. The researche...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 20, 2011, 5:37 pm
Every now and then a study comes along that cuts with laser-like precision into one or two of the murky questions that haunt the sociology of religion. Just such a study has recently been done by Ed Diener, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and colleagues (earlier this year Diener...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 16, 2011, 4:15 pm
Most research into religion looks at how it influences attitudes towards co-religionists. But the flip side to religion is that it can also serve as a foundation for social divisions, in a similar way to ethnic and language barriers. You might think this could increase social tensions, but ne...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 7, 2011, 5:05 pm
In the previous post, I took a look at the fairly substantial weight of evidence linking religion to inequality, specifically income inequality, with religion. The most unequal countries also tend to be the most religious, even when you take into account a variety of other factors. Why should ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 3, 2011, 4:49 pm
Long-time readers of this blog will know that the link between inequality and religion has a particular fascination for me. In fact, the blog started while I was doing background research into a paper I wrote in 2009, on the link between income inequality and religion in countries around the world. ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 31, 2011, 6:59 pm
#SciDoom The Field of Science blog network is having a 'We're all doomed' jamboree. What follows is my contribution to this blogging meme. Check out the other blogs on the FoS homepage to see what they have to say! In David Sloan Wilson's forthcoming book "The Neighborhood Project", he tells ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 25, 2011, 5:10 pm
The US has a persistently high infant mortality rate when compared with other wealthy nations. The reasons for this a partly understood - poverty is a major risk factor for childhood death, And it's believed that the high levels of income and racial stratification could be to blame. Problems with he...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 21, 2011, 3:55 pm
In a nice new study, Pierrick Bourrat (at the University of Sydney) and colleagues have shown that people are more likely to judge others severely when they are given even subtle hints of being watched. The set-up was simple. The subjects (recruited from the Campus Universitaire de Jussieu in ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 17, 2011, 4:30 pm
The infamous 'Pascal's Wager' is still often trotted out as a supposedly rational basis for believing in god. While the flaws in that one are well known, it is still commonly believed that risk-averse people are more likely to be religious. Better to go to Church than run the risk of being fried in ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 12, 2011, 5:11 pm
Patients who participate in medical trials are rarely asked about their religious beliefs, so we should be grateful for any studies that do. Here's one, and it's a study of citalopram (sold as Cilexa and Cipromil), which is a modern antidepressant - a bit like Prozac. So they got religion info...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 8, 2011, 5:46 pm
Here's a novel study looking at how religion relates to social trust - you know, how trusting people are of each other. What's novel about it? Well, first off it's a study of Germans, so that's a new perspective we didn't have before. Even more interestingly, however, it looks at the cultural ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 4, 2011, 4:59 pm
Mrs P thanks God for her recovery from a tragic accidentThis one's been in the news a bit recently - a study apparently showing that religion helps accident victims recover from brain trauma. You can read essentially the same report on lots of outlets - basically it's a straight dump of the p...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 30, 2011, 5:16 pm
The joy of accountancy is that it is no longer a simple game of adding up money in versus money out. Financial dealings these days are so complex that there is an almost infinite number of ways to hide or massage bad figures - if you want to, that is (think: Enron). Now, the really fascinating...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 29, 2011, 4:37 pm
In the previous post, I reviewed the new book Jesus Potter Harry Christ, and thanks to the author put up three copies to win. I was dead chuffed to see so many entries. Not only were they great to read, but it turns out that there are people out there after all who read the blog. Never quite t...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 24, 2011, 4:55 pm
I suspect that most atheists, to the extent that they think about the biblical stories of Jesus at all, probably take the view that they are a big helping of myth built upon a small kernel of truth. That's certainly the view I took. I know that some people claim that it's an entire myth - that Jesus...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 20, 2011, 5:06 pm
Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at UCLA, has come up with a way to measure how fearful nations are. Many surveys ask respondents how worried they are about a range of subjects - war, terrorism, crime, environmental pollution, etc. What Treisman found is that is that if an individual admit to ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 16, 2011, 5:46 pm
Back in 2009, I blogged about some then-unpublished studies by Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia (Why are atheists so disliked). The results suggested that one of the reasons that atheists in the USA are so disliked is because they are distrusted, and that at ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 11, 2011, 5:33 pm
When people are reminded about death, they get defensive. In the West, at least, they will tend to get more patriotic and more supportive of their cultural norms (Asian cultures tend to react a little differently). They also tend to get more religious. Here's the question: do people get more r...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 7, 2011, 5:36 pm
According to a new study just published in Science, societies can be spread along a spectrum of how tight their social control is: ... tight nations are more likely to have autocratic governing systems that suppress dissent, to have media institutions (broadcast, paper, Internet) with restricted con...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jun 3, 2011, 5:29 pm
So, what do you think? Are the religious in America more or less likely than average to support the use of torture? To find out, Arial Malka (Yeshiva University, New York) and Christopher Soto (Colby College, Waterville, Maine) used data from a couple of opinion polls, one conducted in 2...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - May 29, 2011, 6:20 pm
When you get in a stressful situation, your heart rate goes up and your blood pressure rises - the classic 'fight or flight' response. Not all people react the same, however. Kevin Masters, of the University of Colorado, and Andrea Knestel (Brigham Young University), decided to test whether re...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - May 24, 2011, 4:37 pm
A strange phenomenon, which has been noticed before in a couple of studies in the USA, is that people (well, students) tend to behave more nicely if you surreptitiously prime their minds with religious thoughts. When you get an unexpected result like that, the worry is that it's just a chance findin...
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