Transcript thesispresentationbeforecutting

Devotional Unity and Coalitional
Division: How Religion plays both
Jekyll and Hyde to Religious
Tolerance
Ian Hansen
With thanks to
• Ara Norenzayan
• Sheldon Solomon
• John Rector
…and everyone else in the
acknowledgements
And, of course, y’all
Paraphrasings from the
Intelligentsia Echo Chamber
(1) Religion is the biggest cause of violence,
war, oppression and intolerance in the world
Paraphrasings from the
Intelligentsia Echo Chamber
(2) The more religious a religion is, the more
inclined it is to violence, war, oppression
and intolerance
Paraphrasings from the
Intelligentsia Echo Chamber
(3) Religions can be rank ordered from nonreligious to Buddhist to Hindu to Jewish to
Christian to Muslim, in order of their
inclination to violence, war, oppression and
intolerance. Religions towards the bottom
of this ranking are relatively good religions.
Those towards the top are evil religions,
and the most evil is one is Islam.
Paraphrasings from the
Intelligentsia Echo Chamber
(4) To achieve world peace, justice and
religious tolerance, we must move
everyone towards the secular end of the
spectrum, by violent force if necessary.
Otherwise the cancer of religious evil will
destroy us all.
“Today we rescue the world from mysticism and tyranny.”
Can psychological science speak
empirically to this war propaganda?
• Yes, but first some inoculation against
erroneous habits of inference that can
afflict psychological scientists
Understanding what we mean by
“the same thing”
• In the realm of pure logic, if A is the “same
thing” as B and B is “the same thing” as C,
then A is “the same thing” as C.
• Principle of Transitivity
• BUT in pure logic, when A is the same
thing as B, it is PERFECTLY the same, not
approximately the same
In empirical social science…
• When we say A is “the same thing” as B,
what we really mean is A is highly
correlated with B.
• The principle of transitivity can malfunction
if “same thing”-ness is defined this way
For instance
• Just for the sake of argument, imagine that
A and B are empirically “the same thing”.
• If we find that A predicts C in one direction,
e.g. pro-C, we might erroneously apply to
pure logic principle of transitivity, and
expect that B will predict pro-C also.
But check out this factor analysis
Pattern matrix of devotion, rigidity, and intolerance variables
Christians
F1
F2
Devotion to divine
.83
.34
Intrinsic religiosity
.94
.22
Authoritarianism
.54
-.40
Exclusivity
.67
-.30
Fundamentalism
.88
-.15
Dogmatism
.57
-.33
Moral exclusion
.27
-.63
Political intolerance
.16
-.65
Violent antipathy
-.08
-.70
Moral violence
-.10
-.47
% variance
44.9
20.9
Devotional religiosity
Coalitional rigidity
Religious intolerance
Two things or three things?
• Are religious devotion, coalitional rigidity and religious
intolerance 3 things or 2?
• The factor analysis has two factors: a religious devotioncoalitional rigidity factor, and a distinct intolerance factor.
• However, the elements of the religious devotioncoalitional rigidity factor load in opposite directions on the
intolerance factor
• Religious devotion elements load in the tolerant direction;
coalitional rigidity elements loads in the intolerant
direction
• Thus the religious intolerance factor can be considered
one thing, and the religious devotion-coalitional rigidity
factor can be considered “one thing with two opposing
faces”
Empirically unified constructs can
be Janus-faced in their predictions
Religious
Tolerance
Religious
devotion
Coalitional
rigidity
Religious
intolerance
0
†
*
FULL SAMPLE
***
OTHER
†
NONRELIGIOUS
MUSLIM
BUDDHIST
*
HINDU
JEWISH
***
OTHER CHRISTIAN
**
ORTHODOX
PROTESTANT
CATHOLIC
Odds of blaming people of other religions for
the trouble in the world
Janus-faced on Scapegoating
2
Theism
Exclusivity
*
*
***
1
***
***
†
p < .1
* p < .05
** p < .01
*** p <= .001
Janus-faced on War and
Oppression
Independent relationship of religion variables to war and
oppression
0.6
Prayer
Exclusivity
Key:
milspend/gdp
milspend/cap
armsvol/gdp
armsvol/cap
Lack of
freedom
Refugees/cap
-0.6
Refugees/cap: Total refugees who fled the
country in 2003 (per capita)
Lack of freedom: Freedom House’s Freedom
score in 2005 (reversed)
Armsvol/cap: dollar volume of arms imports
and exports 2003 (per capita)
Armsvol/gdp: dollar volume of arms imports
and exports 2003 (as % of GDP)
Milspend/cap: military spending per capita
2003
Milspend/gdp: military spending (as % of
GDP) 2003
Bars represent independent unstandardized betas in separate logistic regressions with national rank in each X variable predicting
regular prayer or exclusivity while controlling for the other along with age, gender and national rank in GDP per capita.
Janus-faced on Anti-Pluralism
Regression coefficient (β ) predicting intolerance
0.8
***
***
***
0.6
0.4
0.2
Devotion
Rigidity
0
-0.2
-0.4
*
*
Buddhist Christian
Muslim
Other
Full
sample
* p < .05
*** p <= .001
Janus-faced on intolerance generally
Regression coefficient (β ) predicting intolerance
1
0.8
***
***
***
***
0.6
0.4
***
0.2
Devotion
Rigidity
-0
-0.2
-0.4
***
-0.6 ***
-0.8
Christian
Nonreligious
Buddhist
Other
Full sample
*** p <= .001
Political intolerance for Multireligious people,
Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, Jews and Atheists
Janus-faced even among Mormons
0.25
**
0.2
0.15
0.1
Religious
Devotion
Fundamentalism
0.05
0
-0.05
-0.1
-0.15
†
Mormon devotion and
fundamentalism
† p < .1
** p < .01
Evidence too hot for the dissertation!
Mormons are less intolerant of atheists
under mortality and divinity salience!
4
Estimated marginal means on
anti-atheist intolerance
3.8
3.6
3.4
3.2
Divinity
Mortality
Dental (control)
3
2.8
2.6
2.4
2.2
2
Condition
Can religious devotion really cause
violence-eschewing tolerance?
6.5
Estimated marginal means on
preference for anti-war essay
6.3
6.1
5.9
5.7
God esteem
Group esteem
Self esteem
5.5
5.3
5.1
4.9
4.7
4.5
Condition
Estimated marginal means for
authoritarianism and political intolerance
Other differences: Authoritarianism
and Political Intolerance
4.5
4
3.5
God esteem
Group esteem
Self esteem
Column 4
Column 5
Column 6
Column 7
3
2.5
2
Authoritarianism
Intolerance
Percent calling suicide attack "extremely heroic"
This mirrors Ginges et al (2007)
25
20
15
10
5
0
Prayer Prime
No Prime
Synagogue Prime
Theoretical implications
• From black vs. white comprehensible
triangles…
• to yin-yang incomprehensible triangles…
• to hexagonal color wheels
Comprehensible Triangles
Incomprehensibe Triangles
Hexagonal Color Wheel
Liberalism vs. Conservatism
Mother Theresa vs. Christopher Hitchens
Mohandas Gandhi vs. Winston Churchill
A more accurate picture
“I see the evidence but it hurts my
head. The war propaganda version
makes more sense and makes me
less uneasy.”
• Perhaps this is because Westerners—
perhaps especially those of us with critical
philosophical or psychological training—
generally prefer straightforwardness to
paradox.
• Paradox stinks of mysticism and tyranny
An evolutionary explanation to calm
your nerves
• In a nutshell, devotional processes may be
(accidentally? adaptively?) linked to
transcending self-not self boundaries (God over
self, God over all)
• Transcending self-not self boundaries is great if
you include in your extended “self” only
trustworthy people who would altruistically help
you, fight for you, and die for you
• However, without a shadow process, devotional
processes might lead you to foolishly include
The Other as self
• The Other might then exploit you as a sucker…
An evolutionary explanation to calm
your nerves
• Enter coalitional rigidity, which helps set the
boundary between coalitional self and the others
outside one’s coalition
• While devotion is expansive and transcendent,
rigidity is restrictive and here and now.
• For the devotional to survive in human
psychology at all, it is necessarily shadowed by
an inclination to practical, rational coalitional
rigidity.
Alternatively…
• Coalitional rigidity is something generally
selected for as an adaptive boon to a social
species
• It is devotion that shadows coalitional rigidity,
because religious devotion gives rigid people
good content to be rigid about—memorable,
emotionally arresting, arbitrary enough to
necessitate unthinking conformity in order to
maintain it.
• But religious devotion is a heavy stimulant to the
imagination, and perhaps gives one greater
ability to imagine moral equality between one’s
coalition and others.
Beyond Darwinianism
• “Independent-minded flexibility” and “religious
devotion” as openness to worldview revision by
“rational-empirical” and “revelatory” knowledge
respectively
• “Coalitional rigidity” and “rejection of devotion”
as being closed to worldview revision with
regard to these forms of knowledge.
• Perhaps the more open you are to ANY kind of
revision in your knowledge—rational/empirical or
revelatory—the more likely you are to conclude
that the Other is your brother.
• But as you open your worldview to revision by
one kind of knowledge, you tend to close it to
revision by the other kind.