Abstract
Widespread religious disbelief represents a key testing ground for theories of religion. We evaluated the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches—secularization, cognitive byproduct, and dual inheritance—in a nationally representative (United States, N = 1,417) data set with preregistered analyses and found considerable support for the dual inheritance perspective. Of key predictors of religious disbelief, witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment was the most potent, β = .28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β = .13, and less advanced mentalizing, β = .05. Low cultural exposure predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection, and cognitive reflection only predicted disbelief among those relatively low in cultural exposure to religion. This highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and transmitted culture and emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning in the cultural transmission of disbelief (preprint https://psyarxiv.com/e29rt/).
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-5-2021
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550621994001
Funding Information
This research was supported by a grant to W.M.G. from the John Templeton Foundation (48275). N.S. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Related Content
The supplemental material is available in the online version of the article. It is also available for download as the additional file listed at the end of this record.
Preprint of this article is available at https://psyarxiv.com/e29rt/.
Repository Citation
Gervais, Will M.; Najle, Maxine B.; and Caluori, Nava, "The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach" (2021). Psychology Graduate Research. 1.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/psychology_gradpub/1
Supplementary materials
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
© The Author(s) 2021
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).