Doctoral Dissertation Research: Disentangling causes and consequences of religious conversion

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Why do people adopt a novel set of religious beliefs and practices, especially if it is a minority one and doing so is potentially costly? This doctoral dissertation research project explores the conditions that make it more likely for someone to convert to a new religion and measures the consequences of conversions for cooperation across religious and ethnic boundaries. Results can help us understand the underlying drivers of recent large-scale shifts in religious affiliation, and their potential consequences for inter-group cooperation and market integration. Additionally, this project will provide research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, offer methods training to underprivileged academic communities, and disseminate results to both English and Spanish-speaking audiences. By using mixed methods in an ethnographic context experiencing high rates of conversion from Catholicism to various forms of Protestantism, this study can help adjudicate between the relative contributions of material motivations, assortment along shared values, and social learning heuristics in driving conversion decisions. This will include conducting retrospective semi-structured interviews, vignette experiments, economic games, and analysis of longitudinal census data. Economic approaches to conversion highlight the economic outcomes that often follow shifts in religious affiliation, suggesting that material motivations drive conversions. However, conversions are not always followed by improved economic outcomes, and even when they are, they may not be driven by material concerns. This project could shed light on the mechanisms involved in conversion processes by introducing a cultural evolutionary approach which focuses on the transmission pathways through which these ideas spread, and their interaction with human motivations and cultural norms.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.