**Explaining the natural and supernatural world**
People differ over how they explain central features of the world we live in. Some prominent subjects of disagreement include the origins of humans, the reason that the sun rises and falls, and whether there is a God. One reason for these disagreements are differences in people’s commitment to religious and scientific belief systems.
This project includes two studies investigating how people explain different kinds of world phenomena. The phenomena that people are asked to explain vary in their sentiment, as well as the domain of the world they relate to. The sentiment of a phenomena is classified as positive, negative or natural, while the domains of the phenomena is classified as either physical, biological, social, superstition, new age or traditional religion.
There are two groups of participants, one group of Christian and one group of non-religious participants. The basic format of the studies is that participants are presented with a series of different kinds of phenomena, asked to provide a short explanation for the phenomena, and then classify the extent to which their explanation is natural or supernatural. At the end of the study participants are asked to answer a series of demographic questions.
The two studies in this project are based on the same dataset and a detailed description of each is provided in their pre-registration documents. The main study uses text analysis to investigate the extent of overlap between Christian and non-religious individual’s world explanations. The supplementary study in this project investigates what kinds of phenomena people give supernatural explanations to.
This OSF project contains all the data and working files needed to replicated out findings.