文章基本信息

标题：Religious Exiting and Social Networks: Computer Simulations of Religious/Secular Pluralism
本地全文：下载
作者：Ryan Cragun ; Kevin McCaffree ; Ivan Puga-Gonzalez 等
期刊名称：Secularism and Nonreligion
电子版ISSN：2053-6712
出版年度：2021
卷号：10
期号：1
页码：2-21
DOI：10.5334/snr.129
出版社：Ubiquity Press
摘要：Statistical models attempting to predict who will disaffiliate from religions have typically accounted for less than 15% of the variation in religious affiliations, suggesting that we have only a partial understanding of this vital social process. Using agent-based simulations in three “artificial societies” (one predominantly religious; one predominantly secular; and one in between), we demonstrate that worldview pluralism within one’s neighborhood and family social networks can be a significant predictor of religious (dis)affiliation but in pluralistic societies worldview diversity is less important and, instead, people move toward worldview neutrality. Our results suggest that there may be two phases in religious disaffiliation: (1) the early adopters initially disaffiliate regardless of social support, and subsequently (2) disaffiliation spreads as support for it within local social networks widens and it appears more acceptable. An important next step is for sociologists to confirm or correct the theoretical findings of this model using real-world socialnetwork data, which will require overcoming the measurement difficulties involved in estimating each individual’s degree of local network pluralism.