Not strictly on social sciences, Stijn Ruiter discusses The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Especially the origin of (human) morality caught his interest. Dawkins quotes brain researcher Hauser, who “does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people […] the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.” That’s interesting – isn’t it – doing statistical investigations to morality? The way people responded to the moral tests given, did not correlate with their religion or religious beliefs. Dawkins builds upon this finding, by arguing that people do not require the existence of a God to be or become good: if the human body can do it for itself, no external force is required.

This line of reasoning reminded me of a post I wrote a while ago, about a Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel who wrote a book about near death experiences. This book was based on findings he published a few years earlier in the Lancet. In that publication, the occurrence of near death experiences during cardiac arrest is cross-tabulated with several variables, such as used medication, but more interesting also with the patients’ religion. Since it was shown that these variables did not relate to the occurrence of near death experiences, the article rejects many existing theories about the experience of an afterlife. Very interesting, but in the book this finding is extended to argue that since the body cannot sustain consciousness during cardiac arrest, the consciousness apparently exists independent of the body. In that, the line of reasoning is quite the opposite of the from Dawkins: since the human body cannot do it, it must lie outside the human. In my contribution I argue that these findings are quite likely to be due to lack of measurement accuracy.

Finally, a warm welcome to a new participant of this blog carnival. Bram Hengeveld discusses (in Dutch) quite some literature from a behavioristic school of research, which he elegantly applies to his own discipline: geriatric nursing. The behavioristic study is basically a replication of the classic Milgram experiments (the one in which participants were stressed to obey authority to administer electrical shocks to others, despite their (seeming) objections). Bram applies the findings from these kind of studies to his nursing profession. Interestingly, he does not focus on the patients (which probably could initiate some more posts), but on the nurses themselves. Most people working in health care, according to Bram, are not satisfied by the conditions under which they work and how these dictate (read: restrict) the level of care they can provide. However, as the experiments showed, in certain circumstances people readily seem to accept their situation and ‘go along’.

That’s it for today’s edition. I hope you’ll enjoy the posts gathered here, and please keep the new posts coming! Next edition will be on March 3rd.

One of the elegances of sociology is found in the unintended consequences of our actions. In my studies of attitudes towards abortion, I found a nice example of such unintended consequences regarding the Catholic church. But, I doubt that the findings are warranted by the analyses.

The theoretical background of the article by Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox (1993) is rather straightforward. It is well known that the Catholic church opposes against the practice of induced abortion. Therefor, it is expected that individual members of the Catholic church will be influenced by this doctrine, and will object against induced abortion more often than, for instance, non church members. On the other hand, people not objecting against abortion, or even having an explicit pro-choice stance on the issue, might feel threatened by the presence of a strong Catholic church in their presence, and express their pro-choice attitudes more strongly. From this the expectation is derived that in regions with high proportions of Catholic church members the non-Catholics will be more permissive towards abortion than in regions with low proportions of Catholics.

The authors test these two assertions using data from an exit-poll, collected in 42 American States. Using regression analyses, they find that indeed individual Catholics have a stronger pro-life stance than non-Catholics. On the contextual level they find the expected opposite result: when controlled for individual Catholicism, people living in a state with a high proportion of Catholics tend to be more permissive towards towards abortion. Apparently, according to the authors, the Catholic church is very well capable of instilling their pro-life stance on abortion in its members. And, again according to the authors, the presence of a strong Catholic church in a state mobilizes the non-members to express an strengthen their pro-choice stance.

However interesting the expectation and supposed finding about the unintended consequences of the presence of strong Catholic church might be, I doubt these findings are warranted by the analyses. Allow me to be a little bit technical. The analyses basically consist of two parameters (plus several controls): individual and contextual level Catholicism. Both variables are added to a multiplicative regression model simultaneously, which has led to the findings as described above. However, the authors seem to interpret the model as if a cross-level interaction effect between individual and contextual catholicism had been estimated as well, which was not the case. Their interpretation of the findings that the effect of contextual Catholicism only instills pro-choice attitudes amongst the non-members would only be warranted by such an interaction term.

Instead, I would think that a proper interpretation of their findings would be that, when controlling for individual Catholicism, the presence of a high proportion of Catholics leads to stronger pro-choice attitudes for everyone. Even, on average, for the Catholics themselves. Of course this is not explicitly tested, requiring an interaction term added to the model as argued above, but it could be interpreted as that people tend to fight for what they think is important when their opinion is contested by the presence of others with a different opinion, and what in a different context would remain salient.

How’s that for an unintended consequence of membership of the Catholic church?

Cook, Elizabeth Adell, Jelen, Ted G., Wilcox, Clyde (1993). Catholicism and Abortion Attitudes in the American States: A Contextual Analysis Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32 (3), 223-230

Sometimes, you just know that the authors of an article you are reading, have had a lot of fun while writing it. The amount of fun just radiates from the pages (or your screen, in the digital age), and somehow, these articles are often the really interesting ones as well. Perhaps this has something to do with the authors feeling certain about their work and their grasp on it.

It must have been pleasant days in the `laboratories’ of Iannaccone and Makowsky when they wrote their article in `Agent-Based Explanations’ of religious dynamics. They start their article with a thought-experiment concerning a magic trick, have named the model they propose MARS (multi-agent religion simulation), and titled their paragraphs with variations as `Life on MARS’ and `Exploring MARS’. 

Despite all the fun, the authors have addressed an important problem in the study of regional segregation of religious (and non-religious) people. Regarding this religious regionalism in America they describe an apparent paradox of persistent mobility and persistent regionalism. The standard-approach to tackle such a problem (variants of regression analysis) fails, for it does not provide a “coherent model linking individual behavior to aggregate outcomes and vice versa”, thereby “ignoring social structure”. I gave an example of this problem of aggregation earlier (in Dutch), which illustrated how one can easily be led to the wrong conclusions, when the social restrictions people act within are not taken into account. 

In order to overcome such problems in the study of religion, Iannaccone and Makowsky have taken the famous Schelling-model and altered it to their needs. The basic version of the Schelling simulation model investigates locations people choose to live and the (segregational) consequences of these choices. The model is famous for showing how very small preferences for living amongst similar people will lead to large degrees of segregation.

Iannaccone and Makowsky have “turned the Schelling-model around”, meaning that people do not adjusttheir location to live based on their preferences, but adjust their preferences based on the location they live in and the neighbors they have. More specifically, the authors simulate whether or not people change their religious preferences (church membership, strength of conviction) based on the preferences of the people directly surrounding them. Moreover,  the MARS simulation model allows the researchers to `solve’ the paradox of persistent religious regionalism by showing that this pattern emerges from their simulations when individuals have both moderate levels of social conformity (being influenced by other people’s beliefs) and personal identity (adhering to own religious beliefs). 

In subsequent examples the authors show the flexibility of the MARS models (which can be seen and played interactively with on www.marsmodels.com). It is illustrated that the model is able to take into account Schelling-like preferences; that is the preferences people have when they select a new place to live, for instance amongst people of a similar religious conviction. It also is capable of simulating the impact of a ‘religious superstar’, that is a strong and influential person, and finally it allows immigration, that is an increase in the number of people present in a specific area. The model is also capable of not only investigating whether or not people are a member of church, but also takes into account which church one is member of, the strength of the religious conviction, changing religiousness without moving, and most of all: the preferences of individuals can be somewhat randomized so that not a single individual has exactly identical preferences (just like real life). 

All in all, I would say that the authors have succeeded in building a very interesting and flexible simulation model, the full power of which is only illustrated in the article. More than a solution to the single problem of the “paradox of persistent religious regionalism”, they have offered a perspective which will probably solve many problems in the (near) future.

There are however two characteristics to the (present) model that I do have some problems with. I’m sure they can be solved rather easily, but to my opinion that would bring enormous improvements to the model. The problems are basically: in real life people aren’t forced to move, and more in general: `where’s reality?’.  

To start with the first problem: since the authors turned the Schelling-model around, people in the simulation are randomly forced to move to another location. This is only valid under the assumption that moving has nothing to do with religious preferences. The authors cite additional research showing that indeed religious preferences hardly influence the choice to move. However, these are motivations of moving people, and thereby does not take into account the people that do not move at all. That might still be religiously motivated. Additionally, the assumption the authors make is only valid under the condition that nothing related to religious preferences (i.e. educational level, social economic status, gender, spouse) is related to the motivations of moving as well, for otherwise there is the alternative explanation for the outcome of segregation based on self-selection. I do not believe that this strong assumption can hold, and therefore the motivation for moving (or not moving) should be taken into account in the model. That would lead to a truly dynamic perspective.

The other issue, `where’s reality’, probably entails the need for a more elaborate extension of the model. Indeed, the model allows the authors to show that the combination of moderate values of both social conformity and personal identity allows for the explanation of the paradox of persistent religious regionalism. But is it a real explanation, or just a possible one. For starters, I would argue that it should be shown as well that these moderate values indeed prevail, for instance by using survey data. But, then again, we are almost back at the beginning, for the survey data does not allow for the aggregation that was achieved using the simulation model (MARS). A thought-provoking solution to this problem is suggested by Peter Hedström, who in his book `Dissecting the Social’ suggests that the actors of any simulation model should be `calibrated’ using observations, such as surveys. Basically, this would mean that the MARS simulation model should be able to replicate the persistent religious regionalism, when all actors are individually modeled after representative survey data. Technically, this would require the model to incorporate for each actor a vector of background-characteristics similar to many of the variables often used in other types of research on this subject, so that each actor represents a respondent from certain surveys. Additionally, from this it follows that the number of actors should preferably be close or identical to the number of (large scale) surveys. Only then we could consider the possible explanations offered by the MARS model (or any other simulation model, for that matter) as real explanations. 

All in all, I think that Iannaccone and Makowsky have developed a very interesting perspective and a powerful explanatory framework, drawing from mechanism-based explanations. There is some work to be done, but despite that the model already shows its potential. I’ll be looking forward to new publications based on this work, but for now, I’m off to play some more with the interactive MARS-models on www.marsmodels.com.

IANNACCONE, L.R., MAKOWSKY, M.D. (2007). Accidental Atheists? Agent-Based Explanations for the Persistence of Religious Regionalism. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 46(1), 1-16. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2007.00337.x

Schelling, T.C. (1971). Dynamic models of segregation. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1(2), 143-186.