Study Suggests There Could Be Twice as Many US Atheists as Polls Claim

No one doubts the growth in the number of nones in the US, that pesky group of nonreligious troublemakers. But a new study suggests that major polls of people's religious worldviews could vastly underreport American atheists. Will Gervais (who has done some great work on psychology, religion and atheism in the past) and Maxine Najle claim that respondents who are atheist simply do not often report their true worldview. As World Religion News reports:

Will Gervais and Maxine Najle, psychologists at the University of Kentucky, suggest a lot of atheists simply don't reveal their true beliefs in the tests. They insist that there is still a lot of social stigma attached to being atheist, which discourages them from revealing the truth in the surveys. It's common for respondents to lie on surveys, giving responses they may feel are more “socially desirable.” Social desirability is the most common problem in all kinds of surveys, and both psychologists see no reason why the same will not be true of this kind of survey as well. Thanks to the fear of social stigma, respondents may have given misleading responses that have resulted in biased results. The scholars have come out with a report that suggests the number of atheists in America may actually be double what surveys show. Gervais hints at 26 percent, insisting that if atheists knew there are many more people like them, they would feel more encouraged to respond more honestly to the surveys.

Vox also reports these findings:

Gervais’s experience studying the stigma around atheism the world over made him suspect these numbers are wrong.

Study after study has shown that most people (even other atheists) believe atheists are less moral. “We’ll give participants a little vignette, a story about someone doing something immoral, and probe their intuition about who they think the perpetrator was,” Gervais says. “And time and time again, people intuitively assume whoever is out there doing immoral stuff doesn’t believe in God.”

So it would make sense that when Pew or Gallup calls, people who don’t believe in God may be reluctant to say so. “We shouldn’t expect people to give a stranger over the phone an honest answer to that question,” Gervais says....

His best estimate [of American atheists]: Around 26 percent of Americans don’t believe in God. “According to our samples, about 1 in 3 atheists in our country don't feel comfortable disclosing their lack of belief,” Najle explains in an email.

Gervais admits this method isn’t perfect, and yields an answer with a wide margin of error. (On the other end of the margin of error, around 35 percent of Americans don’t believe in God.) But the most fundamental question he and Najle are asking here is do polling firms like Gallup and Pew undercount atheists? And it seems the answer is yes.

Gervais and Najle also concurrently replicated the study with a second sample of 2,000 participants, and got similar results. (In this second sample, they framed the atheism question in the negative — “I do not believe in God” — which yielded a slightly lower number of atheists. This could be because people are a bit more anxious to respond to such a definite phrase as, “No, I do not believe in God.”)

Of course, Pew are reluctant to concede the inaccuracies of their polls, but that comes as little surprise.  Indeed, there is evidence that leads one to see the belief in God as a non-binary thing, at least in the sense that there is a spectrum of (un)certainty.