New Study Suggests U.S. Has A Lot Of Closet Atheists
Atheists may have been drastically undercounted because of reluctance to honestly answer poll questions.
04/18/2017 08:03 pm ET
By Antonia Blumberg
U.S. surveys in recent years have calculated atheists make up between 3 percent and 10 percent of the population.
But the percentage may actually be much higher, because the stigma surrounding disbelief in God likely prevents people from honestly answering pollsters’ questions about their beliefs, according to a new report by University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle.
“There’s a lot of atheists in the closet,” Gervais said in a recent interview with Vox.
Gervais and Najle’s report, to be published in the next issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, concluded the true number of American atheists may be as high as 26 percent of the population.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/study-closet-athiests_us_58f67e31e4b0de5bac41d3eb
Why would an atheist lie on an anoymous poll as opposed to, say, not take the poll? Or, even, answer it honestly?
