Appropriating the “Soul”: Evolving Understandings in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Noting a disconnect in the percentage of Canadians and Americans who believe in a soul (75.37% and 84%, respectively) versus those who believe in an afterlife (47.64% and 57.04%), we explore the variables that are correlated with soul belief to better understand how people from these two countries may be conceptualizing the soul. Based on quota samples of just over 1000 individuals from each country, we find that religiosity is not a consistent predictor of believing in a soul, that Christians are more likely to believe in a soul than are those from other religions and the nonreligious, and that holding other supernatural beliefs (e.g., reincarnation, miracles, etc.) increases the odds of believing in a soul. But we also find that there are individuals in both countries who hold no supernatural beliefs yet report believing in a soul, which suggests that what is meant by "soul" is not exclusively supernatural but rather that the term "soul" is evolving in light of changing and declining religiosity in both countries.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".