Mechanisms of Secularization: Testing Between the Rationalization and Existential Insecurity Theories
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study tests two competing explanations of the secularization process related to rationalizing worldviews and decreasing existential insecurity. While the former explanation argues that people are unwilling to join religious groups because of increasing mechanistic understanding of the world that clashes with religious views (and is rather irreversible), the latter argues that it is the decreasing insecurity that causes secularization and that this trend can be reversed with increasing insecurity. In the present study, 811 secular participants from the USA and Poland played a modified version of the Nash demand game, which simulates dilemmas indexing cooperative insecurity. Participants were randomly assigned to either a secure or insecure environment, manipulated by the parameters of the Nash demand game, and we assessed whether they would be willing to join costly normative groups that regulate cooperation in the game. Crucially, participants were randomly assigned either to a secular condition (choosing between a secular normative group and a group with no norms)—our manipulation check—or a religious condition (choosing between a normative group with religious framing and a group without norms)—main test between the two theories. The results showed that participants in the secular condition were more likely to choose the normative group in the insecure compared to the secure environment, but this difference was inconclusive in the religious condition. However, when re-assigning participants from insecure to secure environments and vice versa, we found strong support for the existential insecurity theory. We discuss potential explanations for the discrepancy between stated and actual behavior as well as potential motivations for joining religious normative groups. This submission has been positively recommended by PCI RR (links to Stage 1 and Stage 2 recommendations).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it