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People’s attitudes toward human evolution vary widely among individuals, and these differences might contribute to deeper divisions in our current society. A major international study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined whether belief in human evolution was associated with attitudes and prejudice towards different groups of people in 45 countries. The researchers found a consistent association between lower levels of belief in evolution and higher levels of prejudice towards several social groups.
In many datasets collected in the USA and worldwide, people who do not believe in evolution tend to report higher levels of prejudice against immigrants, racial minorities, and LGBTQ people than people who do accept evolution. I find this pattern quite interesting, especially given that it appears consistently across different groups, although not uniformly in every dataset.
Researchers analysed multiple sources of data, including the American General Social Survey, the Pew Research Center, and several online samples. Researchers tested their hypothesis across multiple countries and cultures (up to 45) over several years, including data collected in the U.S., locations in Eastern Europe, Israel, and many countries with majority Muslim populations. Participants were included in the combined sample through more than 60,000 participants from nationally representative surveys and almost 3,000 participants from online studies.
They examined differences between respondents with higher and lower levels of prejudice based on their level of belief in evolution. Other variables considered included education level, political ideology, degree of religiosity, and amount of scientific knowledge possessed by each respondent. Even after including these variables, the same general pattern was observed across most analyses
According to the researchers, one potential reason for this association may be that believing in evolution fosters a sense of common ancestry for all humans, and subsequently this belief may increase people's feelings of connection to individuals who belong to a different social group than themselves. This idea is interesting, it suggests science may subtly shape how we relate to one another. Regardless, this is simply a suggestion and not an established cause and effect relationship.
The study is correlational in nature, which means there are no causal claims regarding whether disbelief in evolution leads to prejudice or belief in evolution results in a reduction of prejudice, and other sociocultural or psychological variables could influence attitudes and beliefs.
Overall, what the study appears to be showing is that the relationship between how people think about evolution and social attitudes is a common feature across a lot of different groups, leading me to think that there are overlaps between science beliefs and social attitudes, though the precise nature of those links is as of yet not entirely understood.
Reference:
Syropoulos, S., Lifshin, U., Greenberg, J., Horner, D. E., & Leidner, B. (2022). Bigotry and the human-animal divide: (Dis)belief in human evolution and bigoted attitudes across different cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000391
