Valeria Rainero
LightNews LightNews
banner
valeriarainero.bsky.social
Valeria Rainero
@valeriarainero.bsky.social
32 followers 53 following 1 posts
PhD Candidate @UniTrento
Studying religion, secularization, and bias in science
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Valeria Rainero
conradhackett.bsky.social
Fascinating paper! Scholars who are secular are more likely to believe in secularization & find evidence of it in their research. The opposite pattern is true for scholars who are religious.

This is worth your time to read in full:
sociologicalscience.com/download/vol...
Few terms have the ability to fire up conversations among sociologists of religion like secularization. Despite the amount of research produced on the topic of religious change, no consensus has been reached on the trajectory of religion facing modernity. In this study, we test whether the secularization controversy stems not only from disagreements over empirical evidence on religious decline but also from different religious and secular beliefs of researchers involved in the debate. We find that religiosity has a significant negative impact on both believing in the validity of the secularization thesis and finding evidence for it in published work. This effect size is non-trivial: researchers with the highest level of religiosity are 24.0 percentage points less likely to believe in secularization and 19.2 percentage points less likely to find evidence of secularization in their published work than their secular colleagues. This result cannot be explained by differences in methods used (whether qualitative, quantitative, or non-empirical), study impact, or by differences in the religious traditions or geographical areas under study. Importantly, we cannot determine who is responsible for the bias, whether religious scholars, secular scholars, or both. Nor can we assess to what extent this bias is explicit, intentional, and how much of it is implicit and unwanted. The precise mechanisms through which such biases emerge remain unclear as well. Is it the case that researchers make certain methodological choices to come up with a desired study outcome that is consistent with prior beliefs and orientations? Or is it the case that results that align with authors’ ideological views are evaluated less critically than results disregarding their own personal beliefs? In our view, there is likely a confirmation bias at work: people tend to seek, favor, recall, and value evidence confirming their pre-existing beliefs while ignoring or downgrading disconfirming evidence
February 11, 2026 at 10:40 PM
valeriarainero.bsky.social
My first paper is out in #SociologicalScience!
With Jörg Stolz and Ruud Luijkx, we found robust evidence of ideological #bias in #secularization research: researchers' own religiosity is correlated with their probability of finding evidence of religious decline in their publications.
Read more: 👇
sociologicalsci.bsky.social Sociological Science @sociologicalsci.bsky.social · 2d
NEW: Valeria Rainero, Jörg Stolz, Ruud Luijkx, The Faith Factor. How Scholars’ Religiosity Biases Research Findings on Secularization sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...
sociologicalscience.com
February 11, 2026 at 10:22 AM