Religion Programme, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.; Department of Lingustic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 07745 Jena, Germany; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Anna Watts Building, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK.; Center for Research on Evolution, Belief, and Behaviour, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand..
Department of Anthropology & Archaeology, University of Bristol, UK.
Cognition. 2020 Aug;201:104290. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104290. Epub 2020 Apr 14.
Theories differ over whether religious and secular worldviews are in competition or represent overlapping and compatible frameworks. Here we test these theories by examining homogeneity and overlap in Christian and non-religious people's explanations of the world. Christian and non-religious participants produced free text explanations of 54 natural and supernatural phenomena. Using a new text analytic approach, we quantitatively measure the similarity between 7613 participant generated explanations. We find that the relative homogeneity of Christian and non-religious people's explanations vary depending on the kind of phenomena being explained. Non-religious people provided more similar explanations for natural than supernatural phenomena, whereas Christian explanations were relatively similar across both natural and supernatural phenomena. This challenges the idea that religious systems standardize and restrict people's worldviews in general, and instead suggest this effect is domain specific. We also find Christian and non-religious participants used largely overlapping concepts to explain natural and supernatural phenomena. This suggests that religious systems supplement rather than compete with secular based worldviews, and demonstrates how text analytics can help understand the structure of group differences.
关于宗教和世俗世界观是相互竞争还是代表重叠和兼容的框架，理论上存在分歧。在这里，我们通过检验基督教徒和非宗教人士对世界的解释的同质性和重叠性来检验这些理论。基督教徒和非宗教徒参与者对 54 个自然和超自然现象进行了自由文本解释。我们使用一种新的文本分析方法，定量测量了 7613 个参与者生成的解释之间的相似性。我们发现，基督教徒和非宗教徒的解释相对同质性取决于所解释的现象的种类。非宗教徒对自然现象的解释比超自然现象更相似，而基督教的解释在自然和超自然现象中相对相似。这挑战了宗教系统普遍标准化和限制人们世界观的观点，反而表明这种影响是特定于领域的。我们还发现，基督教徒和非宗教徒参与者主要使用重叠的概念来解释自然和超自然现象。这表明宗教系统补充而不是与基于世俗的世界观竞争，并展示了文本分析如何帮助理解群体差异的结构。
