12

Recent Slashdot article:

In a forthcoming book, Engineers of Jihad, published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog provide a new theory explaining why engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. They say it's caused by the way engineers think about the world. Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists.

I am surprised, I believed engineers were far less religious than average (be it in the faculty population or general population).

I haven't found the "survey data" the article talks about, but does it really indicate that? If the data is not available, do other studies confirm/invalidate this affirmation?

nic
  • 1,466
  • 2
  • 14
  • 23
  • 1
    Are you asking about engineers generally, or about engineering faculty? And any particular country? – 410 gone Nov 26 '15 at 11:50
  • 2
    Or is this about the [Salem Hypothesis](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis)? And [here's a link to the "Engineers of Jihad" working paper](http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf) – 410 gone Nov 26 '15 at 11:56
  • 1
    What survey? Did they cite one? – GordonM Nov 26 '15 at 14:52
  • being an irreligious engineer, I'm not too keen on the strong Salem hypothesis... –  Nov 27 '15 at 13:10

1 Answers1

8

This survey by Simmons et al. of ~1500 university professors in America shows that religious belief is negatively correlated with the academic standing of the university, and that engineering professors have some of the lowest percentages of religious belief.

enter image description here

The authors then give some numbers regarding their data:

Psychology and biology have the highest proportion of atheists and agnostics, at about 61 percent. Not far behind is mechanical engineering, 50 percent of whose professors are atheists or agnostics. Behind that is economics, political science, and computer science, with about 40 percent of professors falling into this category. At the other end of the spectrum, 63 percent of accounting professors, 56.8 percent of elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of professors of finance, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 46.2 percent of art professors and professors of criminal justice, and 44.4 percent of professors of nursing say they have no doubt that God exists.

This data shows that engineering professors were in fact less religious than social scientists, in contradiction of the book cited.

March Ho
  • 18,688
  • 12
  • 81
  • 109
  • 2
    This doesn't seem to answer the question, which asks about engineers, not engineering professors: there are good reasons to believe that the latter is not at all representative of the former (and that professors are not representative of faculty). I do agree that part of the ambiguity lies in the question itself though. – 410 gone Nov 26 '15 at 11:48
  • 1
    This specifically counters the claim about engineering faculty, which I consider to consist mainly of teaching staff, i.e. professors. – March Ho Nov 26 '15 at 11:51
  • 2
    Ah, maybe it's a dialect thing then: I'm used to professors being an unrepresentative minority of faculty. – 410 gone Nov 26 '15 at 11:52
  • 3
    Also, 1500 professors and 20 categories makes on average 75 professor per category, each of which can give 7 answers. I wonder how many mech eng and electrical eng were actually interviewed. Look at how different is the percentage of "I do not believe in God" for those two categories. – Peltio Nov 26 '15 at 15:33
  • 1
    @EneryNumbers: 'Professor' in the US is generally a lower grade/more common title than in Commonwealth countries. – Oddthinking Nov 27 '15 at 00:39
  • 1
    @Peltio I agree that this study could *really* benefit from more data points. The authors interviewed a random professor per school to prevent large schools from skewing datasets. That aside, the survey seems to be reasonably good evidence against the assertion in the question, unless better counter-evidence is found. – March Ho Nov 27 '15 at 02:35
  • 7
    Not a single physical scientist or mathematician in the whole data set? Out of 1500? I find it hard to believe that the selection could be justified as "random", which means that we have to ask about selection effects. Well, I followed the link, and they invited 2950 folks using a reasonable procedure, but apparently received circa 50% response rate. They attempted to understand the selection affect but don't report doing anything with the results. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Nov 28 '15 at 00:54
  • Interesting that Psychology professors have the highest proportion of unbelievers. Do they know something about the mind, belief, faith and perception that other people don't? –  Nov 30 '15 at 02:50
  • 1
    @nocomprende No - psychologists are the first to pretend they know something they don't because their field is based on subjective interpretation of behavior. E.g. nail biting, done by over 30% of the population in youth, is considered a mental disorder, but homosexuality, consisting of about 5% of the population is not. – ThisHandleNotInUse Dec 09 '15 at 20:29
  • @ThisHandleNotInUse: I guess I won't hold my breath. –  Dec 09 '15 at 23:01
  • 1
    @ThisHandleNotInUse your example against psychologists is flawed. Nail biting is not a disorder, OCD, which occasionally includes nail biting, is; but the nail biting is not the disorder, and 30% of population is not OCD. Furthermore, assuming that claim were correct the argument would still be fallacious. A disorder is defined as a pattern of behavior that "is associated with present distress or disability or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability". The frequency of a pattern of behavior is not relevant to it's definition as a disorder. – dsollen Dec 10 '15 at 23:07
  • @dsollen According to the DSM-IV, according to wikipedia, it is an "impulse" disorder. – ThisHandleNotInUse Dec 11 '15 at 20:02
  • 1
    @dsollen http://www.canadianbfrb.org/2014/06/27/dsm5bfrbs/ - Seems wikipedia isn't the only one citing the DSM as listing it as a disorder. Like I said, psychologists just make this stuff up based on their political and sociological ideologies. – ThisHandleNotInUse Dec 11 '15 at 20:06