What is it about?
As societies get less outwardly religious, does some religious influence linger on? We used a classic experimental philosophy task to measure intuitive preferences , and found that even atheists in nonreligious societies seem to intuitively prefer faith over atheism. This is among the first experimental evidence for a hypothesized phenomenon that philosopher Daniel Dennett dubbed belief in belief -- an intuitive preference for faith one doesn't perosnally hold.
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Why is it important?
Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, and religions may have been instrumental in the cultural evolution of widespread cooperation and prosociality. Nonetheless, religiosity has rapidly declined in some parts of the world over just a handful of decades. Given these complex dynamics, it is important to consider both large scale polling data (which show consistent declines in religion) and also more subtle experimental investigations of underlying intuitions. Here we find a mismatch: atheists in secular societies who have a lingering intuition favoring religion. This work helps us to understand how religion works in our world, and how cultures evolve over time.
Perspectives
This project helps us understand how large-scale polls about religion give us an incomplete picture, because cultural dynamics can affect our subtler intuitions in ways we might not even realize. This work is discussed further in my book, Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species, which develops a fuller theoretical story about how religion arose, how atheism is taking hold, and how both have origins in our evolution as a cultural species.
Will Gervais
Brunel University
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This page is a summary of: Belief in belief: Even atheists in secular countries show intuitive preferences favoring religious belief, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2404720122.
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