Do war experiences make people religious? Big-data evidence from the Vietnam Lottery
Wed-01
Presented by: Tobias Ebert
Background
Religion has profound psychological effects, such as on our social interactions or well-being. It is therefore important to understand why people become religious and what social processes influence religion. A social phenomenon that has characterized human societies ever since and should be relevant to religion is war. But how does war affect religion? Do war experiences make people more or less religious?
Objective
In this talk, we combine a famous natural experiment with novel big data to provide a causal and ecologically valid examination of the relationship between war experiences and religion.
Research question
Both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence arrive at divergent results regarding the relationship between war experiences and religion. Specifically, some theory and evidence suggest that existential threats (such as war experiences), cause people to adhere more tightly to religious beliefs and practices positive religious coping (i.e., positive religious coping). By contrast, other theory and evidence suggest that doubting God may be one way to cope with adverse life events (i.e., negative religious coping). We test these two competing perspectives against each other.
Method/Approach
We developed a unique empirical design in which we link novel big data to a famous natural experiment. More specifically, we web-scraped Millions of gravestone pictures of deceased U.S. citizens. We then used machine learning to detect the display of religious imagery on these gravestones (a measure of religiosity previously used in historical and cultural studies, which we additionally validated extensively). To obtain causal insights on the effects of war experiences on religiosity, we linked these gravestone data to the Vietnam draft lottery – a random-assignment mechanism that drafted male U.S. residents into the Vietnam war based on their birth date.
Results/Findings
Our empirical set-up allows comparing the presence of religious imagery on the gravestones of randomly drafted vs. non-drafted US citizens (N > 1.2 million). We find evidence that being randomly drafted into the Vietnam war increases the probability of religious gravestone imagery by almost 10%. Placebo group tests reveal that this effect is only present for people that actually received draft calls. Furthermore, we find that the religiosity-inducing effect of war experiences occurs almost immediately and is long-lasting (i.e., is observable even 50 years after the war). Various further robustness tests support these findings.
Conclusions and implications
In sum, our findings suggest that war experiences make people more religious. As such, we (a) contribute to the understanding of how and why people become religious and (b) highlight the long-lasting effects of war experiences on psychological development. Furthermore, our findings also testify how a combination of big data and natural experiments allows for deriving causal and ecologically valid insights for large populations.
Religion has profound psychological effects, such as on our social interactions or well-being. It is therefore important to understand why people become religious and what social processes influence religion. A social phenomenon that has characterized human societies ever since and should be relevant to religion is war. But how does war affect religion? Do war experiences make people more or less religious?
Objective
In this talk, we combine a famous natural experiment with novel big data to provide a causal and ecologically valid examination of the relationship between war experiences and religion.
Research question
Both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence arrive at divergent results regarding the relationship between war experiences and religion. Specifically, some theory and evidence suggest that existential threats (such as war experiences), cause people to adhere more tightly to religious beliefs and practices positive religious coping (i.e., positive religious coping). By contrast, other theory and evidence suggest that doubting God may be one way to cope with adverse life events (i.e., negative religious coping). We test these two competing perspectives against each other.
Method/Approach
We developed a unique empirical design in which we link novel big data to a famous natural experiment. More specifically, we web-scraped Millions of gravestone pictures of deceased U.S. citizens. We then used machine learning to detect the display of religious imagery on these gravestones (a measure of religiosity previously used in historical and cultural studies, which we additionally validated extensively). To obtain causal insights on the effects of war experiences on religiosity, we linked these gravestone data to the Vietnam draft lottery – a random-assignment mechanism that drafted male U.S. residents into the Vietnam war based on their birth date.
Results/Findings
Our empirical set-up allows comparing the presence of religious imagery on the gravestones of randomly drafted vs. non-drafted US citizens (N > 1.2 million). We find evidence that being randomly drafted into the Vietnam war increases the probability of religious gravestone imagery by almost 10%. Placebo group tests reveal that this effect is only present for people that actually received draft calls. Furthermore, we find that the religiosity-inducing effect of war experiences occurs almost immediately and is long-lasting (i.e., is observable even 50 years after the war). Various further robustness tests support these findings.
Conclusions and implications
In sum, our findings suggest that war experiences make people more religious. As such, we (a) contribute to the understanding of how and why people become religious and (b) highlight the long-lasting effects of war experiences on psychological development. Furthermore, our findings also testify how a combination of big data and natural experiments allows for deriving causal and ecologically valid insights for large populations.