 Hello everybody. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm going to talk to you about predictors of religious literacy. My name is making to see them doing this research at California State University East Bay. So what do I mean by religious literacy well this was a term that was popularized by Stephen Perthero and Diane Wars research on religious literacy religious illiteracy. And a lot of this research focuses on people from the United States so with apologies to our Canadian friends and others when we talk about Americans were tend to focus on members of the within the United States. So, research suggests that Americans tend to be considered quite religious with three out of four identifying with a religion and this is in comparison with, you know, other other nations that are similarly wealthy. But only half of American adults could identify even one of the four Gospels, which are the four books in the Bible that talk about the life of Jesus. And when it comes to other religions, their knowledge is even patchier less than 15% could name one of the five pillars of Islam, or one of the four noble truths of Buddhism. So this research suggests that while people might identify themselves as religious, they don't necessarily know that much about their own or other religions. The Pew Forum on religion and public life ran a survey to test a broad range of religious knowledge among Americans. Overall, on average, Americans only correctly answered about half of the 32 questions on that measure. So for higher scores, higher religious literacy was linked with more positive attitudes towards members of most religions so linked with more positive attitudes towards Jewish people, Muslims, Buddhist, the only exception in this case was that not necessarily Christians but overall you see that there's this tendency for more religious knowledge to be linked with more positive attitudes towards members of other religions than your own. So one question that arose is what predicted higher performance now in the Pew study they found that religious identity itself predicted more knowledge and actually atheists and agnostics as well as Jewish people tended to do the best on this measure of religious literacy education made a difference so that more educated people also did better and interfaith contacts so that people with more diverse networks of friends religiously also knew more about other religions. We don't know much about the underlying psychological mechanisms and that's kind of the purpose of the research that I did was to look at what psychological mechanisms might predict this religious literacy. So I've got two studies, one of them is focused on essentialism, and the other one is focused on measures of religiosity and cognitive approaches so we'll talk more about that as we get through it. However, one thing that I wanted to do was to create a new measure. So most of the previous measures that had been used by Gallup by the Pew Forum were predominantly about the Bible and Christianity, many of the questions. So I wanted to create something that was a little bit more balanced in terms of representation of the major world religion so with my lab I created a new 42 item measure for mobile overview. So I started by asking, as part of another study about 325 people what basic facts, everyone should know about their religion. And based on this, we put together a measure that had five questions, each on the high faith Buddhism Christianity Judaism Hinduism Islam Siki, and seven questions on other identities, which included Zoroastrianism Hinduism atheism agnosticism Wiccanism Unitarian Universalists and Taoism. And these questions, especially the sets of five address the origin, the holy text or the scripture the prophet founder. Maybe the holy days and beliefs and practices of each of these religions so they were kind of similar or comparable across the different groups. One of the examples of the questions that we used was the Bhagavad Gita is an epic poem, consisting of a dialogue between immortal Prince Arjuna and who the book of Exodus tells the story of the Israelites escape from slavery in which country. Jesus was renowned for using a particular type of storytelling what is it called Islam. What is the Shahada. The high perspective on science. Now, you realize I'm asking these questions I'm not giving the answers. So maybe that'll inspire you to go out and look them up if you don't know them already. But what the participants actually saw was the question and a multiple choice set of answers to choose from. Now in all these cases we had three different question options, three different answer alternatives. One last one was they always had the option just to say I don't know, and basically not answer the question. So, in this case, science and religion complement each other is the correct answer. And we'll see how people did on that. So that was our measure 42 items. And in study one we're curious about the role of essentialism religious essentialism in predicting these, these literacy outcomes so we had 269 American participants were recruited using an online platform, predominantly Christian with a substantial number of atheist diagnostics and spiritual but not religious. And out of that 42 question religious literacy quiz. The average score was 17.2. So, if they had out of those 42 questions, just randomly guess between one of the three actual answer questions, they would have gotten 14. So, you can see that the average score isn't that much higher than that chat chance guessing score and it was because a lot of people did use the I don't know option. So they completed that quiz they also completed four measures of religious essentialism so I'm going to spend a little few slides now telling you about religious essentialism. So the idea that people use the word religion to mean different things. There's a range of ways in which membership and different religions is construed. So in some religions membership is ascribed at birth based on heritage. It's basically very similar to ethnicity it's kind of seen as ethnicity. Whereas other religions consider membership to be based on what a person believes to be true in their heart. So it's sometimes described as a difference between decent based religions and assent based religions. And what we found is that perceptions of specific religious groups actually reflect this range so that some groups are seen as more about belief more kind of flexible people can leave or come or go, depending on, depending on what they, what they believe at that moment. You know, down here got spiritual but not religious and atheists really falling into that category and then then as you move up different religious groups are seen as more and more essentialized, or more kind of inherent or ethnicity base until you come up to Judaism Hinduism and interestingly enough, Islam are perceived to be more about your kind of heritage or your ethnicity, something you're born into. So we had four different measures for this, this concept of essentialism and two of them were about your own religion so both of them were developed by Cohen and Hill. One of them was the ascent scale so for example being a member of my religion or faith is a matter of what a person believes in their heart. And then we edited the one about the original one that I mentioned God to be more generally about a set of beliefs about spiritual topics to allow for broader applicability in our sample. And then there's the descent scale which you ask people to imagine somebody was born into a different religion but then adopted into your into as an infant into a family of your religion is that person a true member of your religion or faith. Yes, if they undergo a formal conversion. But this idea of biology, playing a role in determining someone's religion plays a part in this descent scale. And then the other measures that we had were generalized religious essentialism so this idea, not just about your own religion, how you identify but more generally. No one can change his or her religions you are what you are siblings born to the same parents will always be the same religion as each other a person's religion is fixed at birth. And then we analyzed conceptions of religion. And then finally we included one that was more about your personal identification so how do you, how do you identify your own. The reason that you are the religion that you are. So what we found was that two of those scales did predict the score on the religious literacy exam and those two were the ascent scale so the more that people personally felt that their religion. was about what they believed in their heart. The more they were likely to know more about other religions and the religious conception scale which is your sense of religions as a whole in general. So the more that people believed that other religions were were determined by biology that they're not changeable the siblings were, you know, born into the same family would be at the same religion. So the more people believed in that kind of biological or genetic based basis of religion, the less they were likely to have high scores on the religious literacy quiz. So, one of the things that that kind of highlights is that the way that we conceptualize religion the way that we think about it as being determined by choice or by ethnicity shapes the efforts that we make to go out and learn more about it. And I think this is part of why, you know, in many of his, his utterances and his talks throughout his travels in the West of Doberha. One of the first principles that you would highlight to the American audiences and the Canadian audiences was the importance of independent investigation of the truth, and not just blindly imitating the traditions of the past but really seeking out, seeking out truth. And he was kind of speaking to this, this need to, to go in and part of that also is is evident I think in some of the findings from the study to. So, in study to we had 447 participants, again, this time it was a representative sample in America. Online through a different platform prolific academic again they were predominantly Christians, agnostic atheist and spiritual but not religious. Again they completed a religious literacy quiz the average score is 20.7 in the sample, and they completed several measures of religiosity which I'll talk about on the next slide and two cognitive measures. They started how much they have studied texts about their own and other religions how religiously diverse their networks were, and how important religion was to their identity. So have a two step data analysis here. So, to go through some of these sample items from these measures extrinsic religiosity actually splits into two, one of them was kind of personal extrinsic religiosity so what religion offers me most is comfort in times of trouble or sorrow. And then there's social extrinsic religiosity which is I attend religious services mostly to spend time with friends. So this is a sense of what does religion kind of bring to you. What do you get out of religion. And another measure of religiosity is intrinsic religiosity so I try hard to live all my life according to my religious beliefs. More a sense of why what religion kind of does to guide you as your personal behavior. And you have quest religiosity, which is a simple item would be questions are more far more central to my religious experience than answers. And then the two cognitive approaches that we looked at were intellectual humility, which is for example I question my own opinions positions and viewpoints because they could be wrong, and finally need for cognition. So this kind of intellectual curiosity I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours. I enjoy complex problems that sort of thing. All of these in some way we might we thought might be relevant to religious literacy they might predict people's scores. And what we found when we put these into a regression with with religious literacy scores is the outcome was that three of these sub scales or scales did significantly predict religious literacy so extrinsic personal was a negative predictor and the more people relied on thought about religion is, you know, serving to, you know, help them in troubled times, the less they were likely to know about other religions. The more that they viewed religion in terms of intrinsic value in terms of a guide for their life. The more they were likely to know about other religions. There was a need for cognition factor, which was again that like intellectual curiosity desires and more desired to think deeply about things also predicted more, more religious knowledge. And then when we added in how much people had spent time studying different religions, how important religion was to them and the diversity of their community we see that while studying religions more and having a diverse community more predicted more religious literacy the the one independent variable. The original measure need for cognition was the one that stayed significant so kind of robustly shows that again the more people desire to grapple with complex issues and think deeply about things the more that they were likely to score higher on the religious literacy quiz. So, in summary, we found these kind of two things emerging from these results, one was essentialism so how we perceive the basis for religious identification predicts how we educate ourselves about other religions. If religious identities in general are seen as changeable as flexible. And people tend to know more about other religious traditions, and also need for cognition the desire to think deeply explore and understand the world also consistently predicts religious literacy. And this type of religious intellectual curiosity is associated with more knowledge about religions. I think one of the examples that stands out to me in my mind was I was running participants and study and at the end of the study. Someone is filling up the demographic form and there's a list of 25 different religious identities that they could choose from. And I see this person pull out their phone and take a picture of that list and scroll down and then take another picture. And I thought that's, that's a classic example of intellectual care of need for cognition. This person is seeing all these names of different religions and is capturing them because I think he wanted to go and look them up later. So, we have these two, these two things that kind of highlight what it is that leads people to learn more about other religions, and hopefully have more positive attitudes towards members of other religions. And the last piece of information I wanted to share because we had these these groupings of questions from different religions, we could actually kind of come and see what are the patterns of how much people know religion by religion. I bought them here the grass are in alphabetical order, but you'll see that there's differences between how much people know so people tend to know quite a bit about Christianity they tend to get more of these questions correct. And similarly, we've got Judaism and Islam people tend to get most of those questions correct. Moderately so, the other other religions, the other five religions, I excluded atheism and agnosticism from this set of five just to make it comparable and because people tended to get those right. And then you've got the the high faith here and sticky here where interestingly enough, the majority of people score zero now again this is out of five questions with three potential answer options each. So if you're just guessing randomly you're likely to get one or two. But I think in these cases, people didn't feel confident enough people were just not familiar enough so that they got to those questions and they just kind of shrugged instead of even trying to make a guess they just kind of shrugged and said I really don't know. So I think that suggests that we can go a long way in, in particular, for, for the pie faith and for for sticky, we can go a long way to just making people more familiar with the existence of the basic tenants of the principles of of these religions so that we can increase that religious literacy more generally and help people understand more. So that's, that's it for my presentation if you have any questions please feel free to email me and want to thank my research assistants and support from my university and thank you for listening.