American mental models of scientific versus theological prestige: a freelist analysis

Abstract

In much public discourse, “Christianity” and “Science” are conceptualized as incompatible belief systems that make competing ontological claims. From this perspective, scientists and theologians are rival knowledge specialists. Prestige is one of the ways we evaluate who we should trust, but we do not know whether the prestige of scientists and theologians is conceptualized similarly, and whether they really are seen as rival knowledge specialists by the bulk of the US population. To investigate this question, we use a free listing methodology to explore public attitudes toward prestigious academic theologians and physicists in a US sample. We find that for all participants, prestige in physics is overwhelmingly associated with forms of intelligence necessary to unravel complex questions about the nature of reality. By contrast, the prestige even of academic theologians is more strongly associated with piety, virtue, and charisma than it is with raw intelligence. They appear to be seen as social models rather than ontological experts. Furthermore, we find that while both religious and nonreligious individuals share a unified representation for prestigious physicists, this is not the case with prestigious theologians: virtue is more salient in Christian evaluations of theological prestige, while charisma is more salient for the nonreligious.