Sunday, July 19, 2009
One of the "theories" I've had for a long time is that the smaller a proportion of a society's population atheists are, the stranger and more deviant they are going to be. A reason I came to this position is that read an account by an atheist American scientist who had some interactions with Soviet religious dissidents during the Cold War. His position was that in many ways American atheists and Soviet religious dissidents exhibited similarities in terms of personality, likely because they were generally not conformists. One of the peculiarities of the massive re-confessionalization of Russian society after the fall of the Soviet Union is the reality that these Communist era dissidents are now being marginalized in many congregations by recent converts who had a background as apparatchiks in the old regime, and were sometimes even actively involved in persecuting their current coreligionists! In any case, what about my hypothesis? Do I have any evidence for it? Not in any substantive manner. So I thought it might be interesting to look in the World Values Survey, naturally. How do attitudes of atheists and religious people vary within a society as a function of the proportion of each group?
I limited the sample to males, because men are more secular on average and exhibit more variance between nations. Additionally, because so many nations have very few atheists I put a lower bound of N = 20 for "convinced atheists." I mollified my own concerns about such a low N with the hope that if an N in a society is that low, the atheists may be strange enough indeed that their deviation from the social median may still swamp the noise. As before, the means for a class were calculated. So, the mean political self position of atheists and the religious is on a 1-10 scale. Below are are the charts for the results of a set of questions which exhibit a 1-10 level of agreement along a spectrum. The position is less important than the difference. First is a simple scatterplot which shows the attitudes of both the religious and atheists by nation. The expectation is a strong correlation between the religious and atheists, because most of the variation is naturally between nations. The second chart shows the difference between the two groups, "Religious persons" and "Convinced Atheists." I excluded those who were "Not religious" from the sample (so those who don't consider themselves religious, but neither are they professed atheists). Lastly, I plotted the difference between atheists and the religious as function of the ratio of religious to atheists. So, for example, the ratio of religious to atheists for Iraq is very high, atheists are a small minority (though to my surprise the N was large enough to stay above the threshold I put). In China the number of convinced atheists and religious are at parity, though those who are without religion and are not atheists are a plural majority. Looking at these results I'm going to withdraw my model. * For the "justifiable" questions 1 = never, 10 = always. * Competition is good = 1, competition is harmful = 10. * 1 = everything determined by fate, 10 = people shape their fates. * 1 = gov. more responsibility, 10 = individual more responsibility. * 1 = incomes more equal, 10 = we need larger differences for incentives. * 1 = private ownership should be increased, gov. ownership should be increased. * 1 = science makes world worse off, 10 = better off. * 1 = Left, 10 = Right. Labels: data, World Values Survey
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Religious people are breeding, producing more religion....(?)
posted by
Razib @ 6/21/2009 02:12:00 PM
I've pointed to the World Values Survey before. It comes in 5 waves spaced out over 2 decades, and has substantial, if not total, coverage. Additionally, for many non-developed countries the educational data to me suggest some high SES skew in terms of representativeness (though spot checking the American data that looks very representative, as there have been other national surveys you can cross-reference it with). On some of my blogs a few commenters have started to follow up posts and use the WVS to answer questions, instead of offering of speculations. It's not as complicated of an interface as the GSS, but it isn't as flexible either. Nevertheless, there are some obvious questions one might ask.
For example in general within societies the religious have more offspring than the non-religious. Even controlling for variables there is often a significant effect. That implies that over time if religiosity is heritable (whether biologically or culturally) societies should become more religious. So a priori assertions such as Mark Steyn's that Turkish secularism is doomed because the rural religious have outbred the citified secularists seem plausible. The WVS can help us answer this sort of question. For example, if the religious are outbreeding the non-religious and religion is substantially heritable so as to counteract any rate of defection than younger age cohorts should be noticeably more religious, right? Are they in Turkey? I use Turkey as an example to illustrate how useful the WVS can be. So first go to http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ I've circled some areas red to click through. Click the area where I've circled read. You need to jump through some hoops (it uses POST to go from page to page). I've broken down the importance of religion as a function of age. There is no trend toward greater religiosity among the young. I've now broken down by both and age & sex. As in most societies secularism is more pronounced with youth among males. I went back and looked at another question in regards to the influence of religious leaders on voting. There is no trend of younger people being more supportive of this. There are plenty of other religion & government related questions you can ask. When Steyn made that assertion I made sure to remember to poke around Turkey's WVS results, and they don't seem to support it. The theory is coherent, but the facts do that match. I hope this is a lesson for readers. Theory provides free information. But since there are tools to check inferences one makes from assumptions one should do so before taking theory as a given (all the above took me 3 minutes, excluding screen capture & Photoshop). Labels: Religion, World Values Survey
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Update: See below....
The World Values Survey has a lot of data broken down by subjective social class. One of these asks how many children an individual has. So I thought it might be of interested to inspect WVS 5, generally taken around 2005, and compare differences by class in term of children. Of course there might be differences in the age breakdowns of the different classes, so that controlling for age there might be greater differences than evident. But as a coarse I thought it would be of interest. Because the data is in proportions I added up the percentage with 3 or more children in class (above replacement). For a few selected nations I calculated the mean for each class (I used WVS 3 and 4 to supplement).* I didn't go into this with any particular hypothesis or expectation, but I'm going to explore particular questions in future posts.... Date below.
Readers with insights about a specific nation (because you actually know something, not rank speculation) are welcome to clarify. I was struck by the differences between Scandinavia and southern Europe. Interestingly, both Chile and Argentina exhibit the southern European pattern. Update: Mean fertility by subjective class isn't too hard to calculate. But the formatting is kind of crappy, so I put the table here. All from WVS 5. Remember that the N's for "Upper Class" are almost always very small, so I'd ignore those. I'm pretty sure that the survey sample for many Third World countries are of higher SES than the population median, so don't get too trusting of the specific numbers, but rather how the rank orders relate to each other up and down the social ladder. Note: CSV file. * I should have calculated the mean for each nation, but it's rather tedious. Labels: World Values Survey
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The World Values Survey Wave 5 has several questions about how much people trust others. In particular, one question asks about religion and another nationality. There are four responses:
-Trust completely -Trust a little -Not trust very much -Not trust at all In the WVS there are proportions for each class for many nations. I took each proportion, and multiplied them by a number where: -Trust completely = 3 -Trust a little = 2 -Not trust very much = 1 -Not trust at all = 0 So that if 100% did not trust at all the number would add to 0, and if 100% trusted complete it would add to 4. Naturally most nations fell in between with a range. I assumed that there would be a strong correlation between the two values. It was very strong, as evidenced by the charts below. OK, so how does religious trust related to how important people think is in their own lives? Again, there are four categories, from very important to not important at all. Again weighting the proportions so that 4 = very important and 0 = not important at all. So how about religious trust vs. religion important? No need to label, there's just no relationship. Weird. I also drilled down for selected nations to see if there was a relationship within the nations in regards to trust (both kinds here) and how important religion was. Not really. In fact, in many nations the least religious trusted those of other religions the least, so it might be expressing a general anti-religious sentiment. As an anecdote I friend whose husband was French one commented how secular French have a distrust of religion in general, and view non-traditional religions with particular distaste, viewing them as cults (non-traditional as in evangelical Protestantism, Hare Krishna, etc.). The raw data....
Labels: World Values Survey
Sunday, June 07, 2009
TGGP has a post up where he looks at attitudes toward polygyny in predominantly Muslim nations. The question is:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with men having more than one wife? Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree? I decided to break-down by religion in those nations which had a large non-Muslim population. Results below.
Update: Above I only posted those Muslim nations with large enough religious minorities for there to be comparisons. Here are the frequencies who "strongly agree" + "agree" with men having more than one wife for all the nations: Algeria - 43 Bangladesh - 5.5 Indonesia - 18.7 Iran - 11.5 Iraq - 47.1 Jordan - 18.7 Morocco - 37.5 Nigeria - 39.4 Pakistan - 1.1 Saudi Arabia - 42.1 Turkey - 15.6 Egypt - 10.3 Labels: Religion, World Values Survey
Monday, June 01, 2009
The World Values Survey has a question of the form:
Some people believe that individuals can decide their own destiny, while others think that it is impossible to escape a predetermined fate. Please tell me which comes closest to your view on this scale on which 1 means "everything in life is determined by fate," and 10 means that "people shape their fate themselves." Below the fold are the percentages in selected nations which picked "10," which is basically the least fatalistic position.
Labels: World Values Survey
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
I looked at data from the World Values Survey in terms of the actual proportion of those in the age group 30-49 for various countries who have 2 or fewer children, vs. those in that age group who thought 2 or fewer was the ideal number. I aggregated Wave 3 and Wave 4 surveys, so the times range from 1995 to 2002. Data, etc., below.
Now a chart, here's how you'd read it: Top of the Y axis = low fertility in the 30-49 age group (lots of people with 2 or fewer children) To the right of the X axis = nations with low fertility preferences in the 30-49 age group (lots of people who think 2 or fewer children is the ideal) The line represents X = Y. So nations above the line are those where there is more ideal preference for children than the reality, while nations below the line there is more reality, so to speak, than the ideal. There seems to be a situation where in many nations people want more children than they are having. That is, their avowed preference is greater than what is revealed by their behavior. There are general clusters. The "breeder nations," where people do have many children, but want even more, and the other set where populations are underperforming even their mild expectations. No surprise that the post-Communist nations are in the second category, but interestingly the East Asian nations of Japan and South Korea fall into this range. Interestingly, these are also nations which tend to be rather secular for their social conservatism from a Western perspective. Georgia is not a typo, though I wouldn't be surprised there was a problem with the data (it might be coded or entered incorrectly). Then there are nations where people have more children than they want. Iran has some specific historical conditions which can explain this. During the Iran-Iraq War the Iranian leadership was pro-natalist, but in its wake they have strongly encouraged family planning. Iran is now a sub-replacement nation when it comes to fertility. Vietnam and India have experienced economic turnarounds of late due to their relatively late entrance into the game of globalization. These surveys occurred around the year 2000, about 10 years into both of their liberalization programs. One might be seeing the outcomes of earlier norms overlain upon new mores due to international media. Finally, as far as Bangladesh goes, it is an ethnically and religiously homogeneous nation, so there isn't a national imperative whereby ethnic groups worry about other groups outbreeding them. Additionally, it is very, very, crowded. There are many poor African nations, but aside from Rwanda and Burundi, all of them are far below the Malthusian parameters when it comes to primary production in relation to Bangladesh. Labels: culture, World Values Survey
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Below when I compared the Nordic countries and Italy on a host of variables, I noted in the comments that it was rather amusing that 99% of the people in Bangladesh asserted that bribery was never justifiable, while only 69% of Swedes did. More specifically, the World Values Survey simply asked if bribery was ever justifiable, and there 10 options, with 0 = never justifiable and 10 = always justifiable. So 99% of the Bangladeshis chose 0, while only 69% of Swedes did. Plotting the 2008 Corruptions Perceptions Index scores from Transparency International against the proportion who chose 0, bribery is never justifiable, resulted in this:
Here's the raw data:
Eastern Europeans and Filipinos are at least honest about their "pragmatism." Labels: culture, data, World Values Survey
Friday, May 01, 2009
Over the years several Finnish readers (OK, one specific Finnish reader) has made the repeated claim that some of the stereotypes that Americans have of politically correct (Fenno)-Scandinavians is actually typical of Sweden, and not Finland, or even the other Nordic countries. As I've been poking around The World Values Survey I think there is something to this. There are some sets of questions where the Swedes give much more "Politically Correct" answers than Finns, or even other Nordics. I note that the answers are Politically Correct because I'm not necessarily saying that the answers someone gives on a survey necessarily translates into the same magnitude of public policy difference. The World Values Survey happens to have Denmark, Sweden and Finland (at least the Four-wave Aggregate of the Values Studies which I'm using). I decided to post responses to a large range of questions (obviously a finite set) for these three nations, as well as Italy as European outgroup. Many of the responses were as you would expect; the Nordic countries are more openly secular than Italy. The fact that Italians were more hostile to the idea of living next to large families also was not surprising, at least judging from what I've heard of how they view the French as breeders. On the other hand, there are a host of questions where Sweden is the outgroup, and another set where Sweden and Denmark are relatively close, with Finland approaching Italy in social outlooks. Finally, many of the results reinforce an interesting point that was clear when I looked at Hong Kong: socialist nations often exhibit some fatigue at the extent of the nanny state, while nations with thinner social safety nets have a more positive attitude toward future extension of the welfare state. Since the results below are a finite subset I invite readers to go in and explore The World Values Survey themselves.
Note: Sample sizes are around 1,000 for each nation. Additionally the surveys were done in 1999 to 2001.
Labels: Finn baiting, Nordics, World Values Survey
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Over at ScienceBlogs I have a post which highlights the bizarre likelihood that in China atheists are actually some more hostile to the precepts of godless Communism than the religious. I talked to Michael Vassar about this and he thought it was curious that Chinese atheists are probably among the segments of the world population most likely to appreciate the non-zero sum power of capitalism and economic growth. Well, I guess Mao and the Cultural Revolution would do that to you, right? In any case, in the World Values Survey there is a question about income inequality, here 0 = Incomes Should Be Made More Equal, and 10 = We need larger income differences as incentives. Below the fold are a selection of nations with the proportions of those in the 15-29 age ranges who agree with a "10" when it comes to income inequality.
Hong Kong, by the way, had the population which was most averse to income inequality.... Labels: Economics, World Values Survey
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
It turns out that the World Values Survey has a decent web interface, rather like the GSS. As an exercise I thought I would compare 4 nations when it came to religious attitudes, the United States, Sweden, South Korea and Japan. The United States because most readers are American. Sweden because it is the apotheosis of European secularity. Japan because it is generally presumed to be an apathetic non-Western nation when it comes to religion. And South Korea, which sends more Christianity missionaries than any nation aside from the United States. The data for South Korea are usually a revelation for Americans, as we are conditioned by the dominant role of conservative Protestantism among our own ethnic Korean population, it is somewhat of a surprise when digging into the data to note that Korea is a much more secular nation than the United States.
The data are open to many interpretations. You can actually do more fine-grained analysis, but I'll leave that for the readers. I would say: 1) South Koreans are more religious than the Japanese, but also just as starkly they are more polarized. Look at the first table and how many Koreans asserted that they were convinced atheists, as opposed to the more mellow Japanese and Swedes. Japan and Sweden are clearly more secular than South Korea, but since religious controversy isn't a feature of their public life, atheism vs. theism is less of an issue. 2) From a Western perspective the American & Swedish data are rather easy to interpret. The high rates of Swedish affiliation despite their secularity is simply due to the history of the established Lutheran church in that nation (only recently disestablished last I checked), and the customary attachment which most Swedes have to the institution. Aside from that, Sweden is secular and the United States not so much. South Korea and Japan are harder to interpret. Despite being very secular Japan is obviously rather conservative when it comes to many social mores, and Korea exhibits the same tendency. Rather than pinning down a specific explanation it is important to note that the role of institutional organized religion has been relatively marginal in these two societies until recently, and what role it did play was of low prestige compared to that in Western societies. In fact it can be argued that South Korea is simultaneously becoming a more religious and liberal society. 3) Despite the fact that Sweden has high rates of nominal affiliation to the Lutheran church, ceremonial and ritual religion seems to be a more common feature of the lives of the Japanese. Labels: Religion, World Values Survey |