Your personality and upbringing predict if you will lean toward science or faith

When navigating life’s biggest questions, adults often lean on scientific evidence, religious faith, or a mixture of both to understand the world around them. A survey of American adults reveals that specific childhood experiences and distinct personality traits predict whether a person will eventually view reality through a scientific lens or a religious one. These results, published in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, help explain how early household environments shape our lifelong philosophical frameworks.

Humans possess a deep psychological need to comprehend themselves and their place in the universe. To achieve this, people construct worldviews, which the researchers describe as “assumptions about physical and social reality that may have powerful effects on cognition and behavior.” Religion and science serve as two primary methods for making sense of everyday life.

Sense-making is the psychological process of giving meaning to life experiences. When someone experiences a major life event, they need a mental framework to process why it happened. Religion provides a metaphysical lens rooted in faith, spirituality, and belief in the divine to address moral values and existential mysteries.

Science offers a different approach, using systematic observation, logical reasoning, and physical evidence to explain the natural environment. While the two systems use distinct methods, both give people a way to interpret the events happening around them.

Researchers wanted to understand exactly how background factors guide people toward these two different frameworks. Previous psychological studies have focused heavily on general religious behaviors, such as how often someone attends a worship service. Few researchers have explored religion and science as parallel, overarching lenses for making sense of reality.

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To fill this gap, a team of psychologists at the University of Connecticut designed an investigation to look at the developmental roots of these worldviews. Crystal L. Park led the study alongside her colleagues Adam B. David, Jeffrey D. Burke, and Lisa Annunziato. They suspected that both the environment a person grows up in and their inherent personality traits play 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 the participants represented a diverse cross-section of the country regarding age, gender, and race. Participants completed a survey that took about half an hour to finish.

The survey asked respondents to reflect on their childhood environments and the behaviors of the people who raised them. It included the Science and Faith Mindsets Scale, which asks people how much they agree with statements about trusting science or a deity to solve humanity’s major problems. The researchers then used mathematical models to look for patterns linking background factors to the participants’ current reliance on religion and science.

The survey also included standardized psychological tests to evaluate the participants’ current personality traits. The tests measured a framework known as the Big Five personality traits. These traits include extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.

The researchers also measured a person’s preference for authoritarianism, which favors strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. They evaluated critical thinking skills as well. This assessment involved solving logic puzzles where the intuitive answer is usually wrong, requiring the participant to pause and reflect.

The results showed that childhood exposure to specific behaviors shaped adult beliefs in profound ways. When parents or caregivers actively demonstrated their faith through tangible actions, their children grew up to rely heavily on religion to make sense of the world. Psychologists call these actions credibility-enhancing displays.

Credibility-enhancing displays include visible commitments like doing religious charity work or attending volunteer events. Merely growing up in a household that claimed to value a religious tradition did not predict an adult’s reliance on religion. The tangible religious actions of the caregivers were the deciding factor in whether a child adopted a lifelong religious lens.

At the same time, high levels of these visible religious behaviors during childhood predicted a lower reliance on science in adulthood. A different pattern emerged for scientific worldviews. When caregivers provided direct opportunities for science learning during childhood, those children grew up to rely more on science.

These childhood science opportunities included activities like taking kids to museums or showing interest in their scientific questions. Encouraging science learning during childhood did not reduce a person’s adult reliance on religion. This detail suggests that a strong scientific worldview requires deliberate childhood engagement with science, but it does not crowd out religious faith.

Parents who want to encourage scientific curiosity need not worry that museum trips will erode their child’s religious worldview. The two frameworks are not mutually exclusive, and many people integrate both into their daily lives. Even though people can hold both views, the researchers found an inverse relationship between the two frameworks in their overall sample.

Higher reliance on one system was generally associated with a lower reliance on the other. This suggests that while individuals can blend these perspectives, they usually lean toward one preferred method of sense-making. Beyond childhood environments, the researchers found that innate personality traits influence worldviews.

Agreeableness, which describes a person who is cooperative, empathetic, and considerate of others, predicted a stronger reliance on both religion and science. This was the only personality trait that pushed people toward both frameworks at the same time. The researchers suspect that making sense of the world through a specified system of beliefs appeals to people who prioritize group harmony.

Highly agreeable people might naturally gravitate toward 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. Other personality traits predicted reliance on just one of the two worldviews.

Authoritarianism predicted a strong reliance on religion, aligning with previous studies linking traditional obedience to religious fundamentals. In contrast, openness to new experiences predicted a stronger reliance on a scientific worldview. This aligns with past work showing that openness correlates with the deliberate cognitive processes necessary for scientific thinking.

The researchers also uncovered some unexpected relationships between personality and scientific thinking. People with lower levels of extraversion tended to rely more on science to make sense of the world. Lower levels of emotional stability also predicted a higher reliance on science.

The researchers measured emotional stability by looking at the lack of chronic negative emotions, such as feeling nervous, sad, tense, or irritable. They had not anticipated this result regarding emotional stability and science. Previous literature generally links scientific achievement with different emotional profiles.

The critical thinking tests did not yield any firm conclusions. The results from the logic puzzles were not statistically significant for predicting either worldview. Demographics played a small role as well, with older individuals and women being slightly more likely to rely on religion.

Like all scientific investigations, this project has limitations that provide context for the results. The study relied on a single survey taken at one point in time, meaning the researchers cannot definitively prove that childhood experiences cause specific adult worldviews. The data only shows a mathematical association between these different factors.

Additionally, the participants had to rely on their memories to report their childhood experiences. Adult memories can be flawed, and a person’s current belief system might color how they remember their parents’ actions from decades ago. A person who currently dislikes religion might selectively remember their caregivers’ religious behaviors differently than someone who embraces their faith.

The study also did not ask participants to specify their exact religious denominations. Future research could explore whether these patterns hold true across specific faith traditions, such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Investigating these distinct groups might reveal subtle differences in how credibility-enhancing displays influence children in different cultural contexts.

Psychologists will need to conduct longitudinal studies to track people over many years, starting in childhood and continuing into adulthood. Tracking children over time would eliminate the problem of faulty memory and provide a clearer picture of how worldviews evolve. Expanding this line of inquiry will help experts understand how early environments shape the way we navigate the universe.

The study, “Childhood experiences and personal traits as predictors of reliance on science and on religion to make sense of the world: results of a national US study,” was authored by Crystal L. Park, Adam B. David, Jeffrey D. Burke, and Lisa Annunziato.