The longitudinal effects of material security on belief in God in young Americans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalence of religious beliefs and practices is puzzling from the evolutionary viewpoint, but previous research suggested that religious traditions provide cooperative benefits and improve well-being. Seemingly in contrast with this claim are worldwide secularization trends where people disaffiliate from religions and belief in god(s). Theoreticians suggested that diminished pressures on cooperation and well-being no longer motivate individuals to seek religious benefits and pay the participation costs. We investigate this causal claim using the National Study of Youth and Religion dataset, which tracks the development of religiosity among US Christians from adolescence to young adulthood (n = 3 370). Using a general lagged panel methodology, we found that material security in Wave 1 (early adolescence) predicts higher probability of decrease in belief in God in Wave 4 (young adulthood). This result provides support for the hypothesis that participation in religious traditions is associated with living in an insecure socio-ecology, where the systems may still confer benefits onto their members. We conclude with a call for further research using more nuanced measures and larger sample sizes that may provide further insights into the potentially adaptive nature of cultural systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".