As the number of nonreligious individuals has been increasing around the world, the team explored what exactly nonreligious beliefs and worldviews entail. Rather than assuming an absence of belief or imposing a predetermined set of beliefs, the research team used an open-ended approach to investigate which secular beliefs and worldviews nonreligious nontheistic individuals in ten countries around the world might endorse. In the study, approximately one thousand answers were analyzed (100 participants per country).
To analyze the answers, the team created a data-driven coding scheme, showing that the ten most frequently mentioned categories were science, humanism, critical skepticism, natural laws, equality, kindness and caring, care for the earth, left-wing political causes, atheism, and individualism and freedom. The research demonstrates that there is a range of secular beliefs, clustering together in scientific worldviews, humanist worldviews, and caring nature-focused worldviews, which provide answers the big questions about life.
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In a paper published in Religion, Brain & Behavior, J. Nenadalová & D. Řezníček demonstrated that some study participants in a sensory-deprived laboratory environment sensed the presence of another person. This feeling was mostly associated with perceived uncertainty and only somewhat associated with psychological dispositions.
In a cross-national investigation published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, F. M. Saxler with LEVYNA’s E. Kundtová Klocová and other colleagues show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected young people’s normative beliefs about unpaid domestic work; and that this effect is stronger in countries with greater gender inequality.
