William James Hoverd

What's in a flag? Subliminal exposure to New Zealand national symbols and the automatic activation of egalitarian versus dominance values.

ABSTRACT Three experiments tested whether the subliminal presentation of national symbols automatically elicited societally prescribed normative values in the New Zealand (NZ) context using a lexical decision task. Consistent with research in the United States, the presentation of the NZ flag (Study 1), but not another consensually validated NZ national symbol (The Silver Fern, Study 2), increased the cognitive accessibility of egalitarian value concepts. The NZ flag did not, however, activate values in a comparable sample of foreign nationals (Study 3). National flags, it seems, automatically activate normative values for ingroup members, and this effect is not limited to nations with a high frequency of flag-display behavior such as the United States.

Forecasting religious change: a Bayesian model predicting proportional Christian change in New Zealand

For over a century, sociologists of religion have been describing declining trends in religious affiliation across most industrialized countries, a trend that Max Weber characterized as “the disenchantment of the world.” Although secularization is a matter of ongoing debate, there is relatively little predictive modeling. Using New Zealand census data from 1966–2006, we develop a Bayesian predictive model to forecast the proportion of the population identifying as Christian in the future. A surprisingly simple linear model revealed that Christian affiliation in New Zealand has been steadily declining at a constant rate of around 0.90% per year since 1966. The model explained 97.4% of the variance in proportional change in the New Zealand Christian population over the past half-century. The model also offers testable predictions. We estimate that 46.1% of the population will identify as Christian in New Zealand in 2015, with a further decline to 41.7% by 2020. The 95% credible interval for the 2015 estimate is between 42.5% and 49.6%. The 95% credible interval for the 2020 estimate is between 37.7% and 45.8%. We consider both the strengths of this Bayesian crystal ball and its potential limitations.

Does poverty predict religion

The question of how religion relates to poverty has long fascinated social scientists, yet answers remain elusive. Deprivation theory holds that lower socio-economic standing is associated with higher religious identification, but not with religious affiliation. Cross-cultural support, however, is limited. The present study addressed this gap by testing the predictions of deprivation theory using a large (n =6,518) national probability sample of New Zealanders. A key innovation of our study is the use of an objective index of neighborhood deprivation derived from a Principle Components Analysis of New Zealand Census data. Consistent with deprivation theory, we found that neighborhood deprivation predicted religious identification, but not religious affiliation. Adding education to the model improved fit, but did not attenuate the effect of deprivation. Importantly, the addition of ethnicity to the deprivation model produced a better fit for predicting the strength of religious identification. These results suggest a role for cultural inheritance in explaining the mechanisms by which religious identity and religious affiliation are related to each other, and over time. Finally, we consider these findings through a discussion that integrates evolutionary models of religion with the sociological model of deprivation theory.