Understanding links between secularization, rationalisation and insecurity

The study tests two competing explanations of the secularization process related to rationalizing worldviews and decreasing existential insecurity. While the former explanation argues that people are unwilling to join religious groups because of increasing mechanistic understanding of the world that clashes with religious views, the latter argues that it is the decreasing insecurity that causes secularization and that this trend can be reversed with increasing insecurity. We will use an experimental framework where 880 secular participants from the USA and Poland will play a modified version of the Nash demand game, which simulates dilemmas indexing cooperative insecurity. Participants will be randomly assigned to either a secure or insecure environment, manipulated by the parameters of the Nash demand game, and we will assess whether they would be willing to join costly normative groups that regulate cooperation. Crucially, participants will be randomly assigned either to a secular condition (choosing between a secular normative group and a group with no norms) or a religious condition (choosing between a normative group with religious framing and a group without norms). After the random assignment, participants will choose whether to play the demand game in the normative or non-normative group and make their game choice (withdrawing money from a common pool). We will first test the effectiveness of our manipulation in the secular condition (participants should be more like to choose the normative group in the insecure environment) and then test the two competing theories by analyzing whether insecurity increases the probability of choosing the normative group in the religious condition.