Behavioral Science Department, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60640.
Management & Organizations Department, National University of Singapore Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117561, Singapore.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Aug 22;120(34):e2304748120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2304748120. Epub 2023 Aug 14.
The global decline of religiosity represents one of the most significant societal shifts in recent history. After millennia of near-universal religious identification, the world is experiencing a regionally uneven trend toward secularization. We propose an explanation of this decline, which claims that automation-the development of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)-can partly explain modern religious declines. We build four unique datasets composed of more than 3 million individuals which show that robotics and AI exposure is linked to 21st-century religious declines across nations, metropolitan regions, and individual people. Key results hold controlling for other technological developments (e.g., electricity grid access and telecommunications development), socioeconomic indicators (e.g., wealth, residential mobility, and demographics), and factors implicated in previous theories of religious decline (e.g., individual choice norms). An experiment also supports our hypotheses. Our findings partly explain contemporary trends in religious decline and foreshadow where religiosity may wane in the future.
宗教信仰的全球性衰落是近年来最重大的社会变革之一。在经历了几千年近乎普遍的宗教认同之后，世界正呈现出一种区域性的、不均衡的世俗化趋势。我们提出了一种对这种衰落的解释，认为自动化——机器人和人工智能（AI）的发展——可以部分解释现代宗教的衰落。我们构建了四个独特的数据集，这些数据集由 300 多万人组成，表明机器人技术和 AI 的应用与各国、大都市地区和个人的 21 世纪宗教衰落有关。在控制了其他技术发展（例如，电网接入和电信发展）、社会经济指标（例如，财富、居住流动性和人口统计学）以及先前宗教衰落理论所涉及的因素（例如，个人选择规范）后，主要结果仍然成立。一项实验也支持了我们的假设。我们的研究结果部分解释了当代宗教衰落的趋势，并预示着未来宗教可能会在何处衰落。
