When solving life’s biggest problems, adults often rely on scientific evidence, religious faith, or a combination of both to understand the world around them. A study of American adults found that certain childhood experiences and distinct personality traits can predict whether a person ends up viewing reality through a scientific or religious lens. These results were published in the journal religion, brain, behaviorhelps explain how early family environments shape our lifelong philosophical frameworks.
Humans have a deep psychological need to understand themselves and their place in the universe. To achieve this, people construct worldviews. Researchers describe it as “assumptions about physical and social reality that can have powerful effects on cognition and behavior.” Religion and science serve as two primary ways of understanding everyday life.
Sensemaking is a psychological process that gives meaning to life experiences. When you experience a major event in your life, you need a mental framework to understand why it happened. Religion provides a metaphysical lens, rooted in faith, spirituality, and belief in God, through which to approach moral values and existential mysteries.
Science offers a different approach to explaining the natural environment using systematic observation, logical reasoning, and physical evidence. Although the two systems use different methods, they both provide people with ways to interpret events happening around them.
The researchers wanted to understand exactly how background factors lead people to these two different frameworks. Previous psychological research has focused on general religious behaviors, such as the frequency of attending religious services. Few researchers have explored religion and science as parallel and comprehensive lenses for understanding reality.
To fill this gap, a team of psychologists at the University of Connecticut designed a study to examine the developmental roots of these worldviews. Crystal L. Park led the study with colleagues Adam B. David, Jeffrey D. Burke, and Lisa Annunziato. They believed that both the environment in which a person was raised and their inherent personality traits played a role in shaping their ultimate worldview.
Park and her team recruited 300 adults from across the United States. The researchers used an online platform to ensure that participants were representative of the country’s diverse demographics in terms of age, gender, and race. Participants completed a survey, which took approximately 30 minutes to complete.
The survey asked respondents to reflect on their childhood environment and the behavior of those who raised them. This included the Science and Faith Attitude Scale, which asked people how much they agreed with the statement that they trust science and God to solve humanity’s major problems. The researchers then used a mathematical model to look for patterns linking background factors to participants’ current reliance on religion or science.
The study also included standardized psychological tests to assess participants’ current personality traits. This test measured a framework known as the Big 5 personality traits. These traits include extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.
The researchers also measured people’s preference for authoritarianism, which favors strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. They also assessed critical thinking skills. The assessment involved solving logic puzzles whose intuitive answers were usually wrong, requiring participants to stop and think.
The results show that exposure to certain behaviors in childhood deeply shapes adult beliefs. When parents and caregivers actively demonstrated their faith through concrete actions, children began to rely heavily on religion to make sense of the world. Psychologists call these behaviors “confidence-enhancing displays.”
Credibility-enhancing exhibits include visible commitments such as participation in religious charities and volunteer events. Just because someone grew up in a family that claims to value religious traditions does not predict that an adult will become religiously dependent. Caregivers’ specific religious behavior was a determining factor in whether children adopted religious perspectives throughout their lives.
At the same time, high levels of these visible religious behaviors in childhood predicted lower reliance on science in adulthood. Another pattern emerged in the scientific worldview. When caregivers provided direct opportunities for science learning during early childhood, these children grew up to rely more on science.
These science opportunities for kids included activities like taking kids to museums and getting them interested in scientific questions. Encouraging science learning in childhood did not reduce reliance on religion as adults. This detail suggests that a strong scientific worldview requires intentional engagement with science during childhood, but that it does not crowd out religious beliefs.
Parents who want to encourage scientific curiosity don’t have to worry that a museum trip will erode their child’s religious worldview. The two frameworks are not mutually exclusive, and many people incorporate both into their daily lives. Although people can hold both views, the researchers found an inverse relationship between the two frameworks across their sample.
In general, the more dependent you are on one system, the less dependent you are on the other. This suggests that while individuals can combine these perspectives, they are typically biased toward one preferred method of sensory decision making. Researchers have found that beyond childhood environment, innate personality traits influence worldviews.
Agreeableness, which refers to people who are cooperative, empathetic, and considerate of others, predicted greater reliance on both religion and science. This was the only personality trait that brought people closer to both frameworks simultaneously. Researchers suspect that understanding the world through a particular belief system may be appealing to people who prioritize group harmony.
Highly agreeable people may be naturally drawn to structured belief systems that emphasize collective understanding. This focus on the needs of others fits well with both organized religion and the collaborative nature of science. We predicted that other personality traits would depend on only one of the two worldviews.
Authoritarianism predicts stronger dependence on religion, consistent with previous research linking traditional obedience to religious fundamentals. In contrast, openness to new experiences predicted a stronger reliance on a scientific worldview. This is consistent with past research showing that openness correlates with the intentional cognitive processes required for scientific thinking.
The researchers also revealed some unexpected relationships between personality and scientific thinking. People with low levels of extraversion were more likely to rely on science to understand the world. Lower emotional stability also predicted higher reliance on science.
Researchers measured emotional stability by looking at the lack of chronic negative emotions such as nervousness, sadness, nervousness, and irritability. They did not expect this result regarding emotional stability and science. Previous literature generally associates scientific outcomes with different emotional profiles.
Critical thinking tests did not yield clear conclusions. The results of the logic puzzles were not statistically significant in predicting either worldview. Demographics play a small role as well, with older people and women slightly more likely to rely on religion.
As with all scientific research, this project has limitations that provide context for the results. The study relies on a single study conducted at one point in time, meaning the researchers cannot conclusively prove that childhood experiences cause a particular adult worldview. The data only shows the mathematical relationship between these different factors.
Furthermore, participants had to rely on memory to report their childhood experiences. Adult memories can be flawed, and a person’s current belief system can influence how they remember their parents’ actions from decades ago. People who currently dislike religion may selectively remember their caregivers’ religious behaviors, unlike those who are religious.
The study did not ask participants to identify their exact religious denomination. Future research could examine whether these patterns hold across specific faith traditions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Examining these different groups may reveal nuances in how authenticity-enhancing displays affect children from different cultural backgrounds.
Psychologists will need to conduct longitudinal studies that follow people over many years, from childhood to adulthood. If we follow children over time, we may be able to resolve the issue of memory loss and gain a clearer picture of how their worldviews evolve. Expanding the scope of this research will help experts understand how early environments shape the way we navigate space.
The study, “Childhood Experiences and Personal Characteristics as Predictors of Reliance on Science and Religion to Understand the World: Results from a U.S. National Survey,” was authored by Crystal L. Park, Adam B. David, Jeffrey D. Burke, and Lisa Annunziato.
