The origins of disbelief among Polish younger and older adults: The interactive role of analytic thinking and cultural learning of religion
Start and end dates: 1 January 2023 – 30 June 2024
Award: £34,788
According to a recent investigation by the Pew Research Center, Poland, once a stronghold of Christian religiosity in Europe, is one of the fastest secularizing countries in the world. Poland has the largest gap between levels of religious belief among younger and older adults (Pew Research Center, 2018), making Poland a highly interesting case of dramatic intergenerational difference in religious belief within a cultural context of Christian heritage.
One potential explanation for the rising rates of disbelief among Polish youth focuses on the diminishing position of the Polish Catholic Church, which has been tainted with corruption and sexual scandals over the last few years (Ramet, 2017). In this view, which emphasizes the cultural transmission of religious beliefs, it is suggested that while instances of credible religious behavior will promote religiosity in children, credibility undermining displays such as religious hypocrisy can diminish the degree to which beliefs are passed on to the next generations (Lanman, 2012; Turpin et al., 2019). In Poland, however, Christian religiosity has been traditionally intertwined with nationalism (Ramet, 2017), and as a consequence general social conformism may decrease the influence of credibility undermining displays on the transmission of religious beliefs. Moreover, it is not yet clear what the interaction is between mechanisms of cultural transmission of religion and cognitive biases that have been argued to override intuitive belief in religious phenomena, such as analytic thinking (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012). Previous empirical research in this area offers conflicting predictions, with some findings suggesting that analytic thinking reliably predicts disbelief in God only in more normatively religious environments (Gervais et al., 2018), while others have found that analytic style primarily promotes disbelief among individuals who are generally low in their exposure to credible religious learning (Gervais et al., 2021). Therefore, whether the role of analytic thinking in promoting disbelief is more pronounced in more or less culturally religious environments currently remains an unresolved question.
Taking this into consideration, this project aims to determine whether cognitive analytic thinking can causally contribute to religious disbelief. It looks to verify whether its impact is independent or moderated by cultural exposure to religion during one’s upbringing. The project will recruit two nationally representative samples of younger and older Polish adults and, using causal-comparative and longitudinal designs, cast light on the role of cognitive and socio-cultural factors in the emergence of disbelief. We will focus on two different aspects: a) establishing the generalizability of the effect of analytic thinking within a single society, taking into consideration the naturally occurring intergenerational differences in rates of religiosity among Polish adults, and b) increasing methodological rigor and precision in the measurement of both analytic thinking and social exposure to religion. Overall, by investigating the specificity of the Polish religious landscape, the project intends to provide much-needed insight into the more general causal origins of atheism.
