For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about innovative methods for surveying religious beliefs and the prevalence of atheism.
In 2017, University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle published a paper titled “How Many Atheists Are There?” arguing — on the basis of provocative preliminary research — that traditional surveys of religious attitudes might be consistently and significantly undercounting the number of people who don’t believe in God. They suspected that the concept of atheism carried enough of a negative social stigma that many people who met the criteria of disbelief would be unwilling to admit it directly, even in an anonymous survey. In the paper, Gervais and Najle argued for a different approach — the unmatched count technique, a survey method pioneered in the late 1970s and since used as a way to get accurate, anonymous estimates for delicate or even incriminating questions on topics ranging from drug use to domestic violence.
Now, building on those initial results from 2017, University of British Columbia psychologist Azim Shariff is working with Gervais to design and deploy experiments that will refine the survey technique for questions about religious disbelief, both in North American contexts and internationally in societies like Saudi Arabia or Sweden whose members may feel different levels of social pressure when it comes to admitting atheism, even anonymously.