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<\/a>In modern, industrialised societies, we put an awful lot of trust in strangers. That\u2019s good, because if we couldn\u2019t trust strangers then most of our economic and social transactions would struggle. In fact, trust is a cornerstone of economic growth.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hardly surprising, then, that nations with high levels of trust are also the wealthiest. They also often have a high number of atheists \u2013 Sweden is the classic example.<\/p>\n
But does atheism add to that trust, or take away from it? After all, atheists are (famously) one of the least trusted minorities in the USA.<\/p>\n
Two Swedish researchers (Niclas Berggren and Christian Bj\u00f8rnskov of the Ratio Institute<\/a> in Stockholm) have looked at what role religion has in explaining different levels of trust in countries around the world, and in different States of the USA (Working paper only, available here<\/a>).<\/p>\n The first thing they show is that non-religion and trust are correlated. In countries with more religious people, and in states with more religious people, fewer people are will to answer \u201cyes\u201d to the question \u201cIn general, do you think most people can be trusted or can\u2019t you be too careful?\u201d<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019s interesting in itself, but of course there could be any number of reasons for that correlation. For example, income inequality erodes trust, and it also increases religiosity. Berggren and Bj\u00f8rnskov take care of most of them by adding them into their model. Just in case there\u2019s something magic about Nordic countries, they even included them as an \u2018explanatory factor\u2019 (it turns out that there does indeed seem to be something special about them \u2013 it\u2019s not just the atheism)<\/p>\n For the US states, they adjusted again for income inequality, blacks, and ages. They also took into account from which countries the local\u2019s ancestors had emigrated. Again, the correlation stuck.<\/p>\n To give you a feel for how strong the effect is, if you go from the average nation religiosity (67% of people saying that religion is important in their lives) to Nordic levels (20%), the number of trusting people goes up by about 8-10 percentage points (and this is after adjusting for all the factors mentioned above).<\/p>\n Among US states, the effect is similar. If you move from the average (65%) to the least religious (Vermont, 42%), then trust increases by about 5-10 percentage points.<\/p>\n How did they demonstrate causality?<\/span><\/p>\n What they\u2019ve shown is a correlation, of course. So how can they be confident that it\u2019s atheism increasing trust, rather than trust increasing atheism? Well, they use a statistical trick (guess I have to be careful with that word, given the climate email controversy!) call \u2018instrumented variables\u2019. Basically, this means choosing another variable that correlates with religion but can\u2019t directly be influenced by trust.<\/p>\n They chose GDP which might seems strange choice given that trust is an important cause of economic growth. However, they show that the other factors included in the model account for this relationship, and that GDP is independent of reverse causality.<\/p>\n How could more religion mean less trust?<\/span><\/p>\n It seems strange, given that religion is supposed to increase honest behaviour, that people in less religious countries have more trust in their neighbours. Berggren and Bj\u00f8rnskov argue that this is probably because of the divisive effect that religion can have:<\/p>\n The main reason to expect a negative effect, of the kind we have identified, is that religions may cause division and rift, both in that religious people may distrust those who do not share their beliefs and who are not subject to the same enforcement mechanisms as they are, and in that nonreligious people may regard with suspicion those who take religiosity seriously.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, one explanation for these results might that religion promotes distrust of people outside the group. It sounds intuitively plausible, and it\u2019s an idea that\u2019s supported by other the research into the causes of distrust.<\/p>\n While you might expect that people distrust anyone who\u2019s different from them, it turns out that that is not the case. Diversity only increases distrust when the different groups are segregated from each other. This is from a talk<\/a> by Eric Uslaner, at the University of Maryland:<\/p>\n \u2026 diversity can also drive people apart\u2013when people feel threatened by minority groups. Most critically, diversity can drive down trust when there is little opportunity for contact between groups groups\u2013as where the minority group is geographically segregated from the majority.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n However, Uslaner also points out that religious diversity does not itself seem to greatly increase distrust. It\u2019s the strength of religious feeling that\u2019s critically important:<\/p>\n Religious fractionalization is only weakly related to ethnic and linguistic diversity. Religious fundamentalists are significantly less trusting than adherents of mainstream religions (Uslaner, 2002, ch. 4) and religious conflict is at the heart of many inter-state and intra-state wars. So we might expect that religious diversity would be more strongly (negatively) related to generalized trust\u2013but again, we see only a weak relationship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, the interesting thing about religious diversity is that it actually decreases<\/span> the level of religious fervour. If religious fervour is critical to distrust, that would help explain the unexpectedly weak relationship between religious diversity and trust.<\/p>\n Well, so much for the philosophizing. What we need now is for someone to tease out these two factors to see which explains the link between atheism and trust.<\/p>\n __________________________________________________________________________ In modern, industrialised societies, we put an awful lot of trust in strangers. That\u2019s good, because if we couldn\u2019t trust strangers then most of our economic and social transactions would struggle. In fact, trust is a cornerstone of economic growth. It\u2019s hardly surprising, then, that nations with high levels of trust are also the wealthiest. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a>However, even after adjusting for income inequality, presence of a monarchy (increases trust, apparently), post-communism, and proportion of Muslims, Catholics or eastern religious people (none of the religions had any effect), the correlation remains pretty robust.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"