Religiosity makes people happy – this has been shown in numerous studies. The belief in a higher power helps to preserve a feeling of control even if the here and now turns out to be chaotic. It prevents existential fears by rendering the world well-ordered and predictable.

But in modern societies fewer and fewer people believe in God. In former times, someone who got severely ill would pray to the Almighty Father – today many patients prefer to trust in modern medicine, at least in Western countries. For social scientists, the question about the consequences of this change is an intriguing one.

Can believing in scientific and technological progress convey a sense of control to people and thereby make them happy and satisfied? Olga Stavrova, Daniel Ehlebracht and Detlef Fetchenhauer have investigated this question in an article, analyzing data from two representative international population samples.

To begin with they showed that people in the Netherlands tended to be the more satisfied with their lives the more they believed in the progress of science and technology. The question if they were religious played a less important part. This correlation could partly be explained by the fact that people who believed in progress felt that they could exercise control over their lives.

However, the Netherlands are a quite secular nation – and the authors suspected that belief in progress makes people especially satisfied with their lives when they live in societies in which this belief is comparatively widespread. This is because we feel especially well when others around us perceive the world in the same way as we do: This facilitates social interaction and gives us the feeling to be right with our take on things.

The authors thus also tested their results using data from 72 countries. In 69 of them they found a considerable positive correlation between the belief in progress and life satisfaction while religiosity only correlated positively with life satisfaction in 23 countries and even correlated negatively with it in ten countries.

Once more, people who believed in progress were more likely to have a sense of control over their lives, and indeed they were particularly more content with their lives when many of their fellow citizens shared their belief in progress. Thus, it does not only matter what we believe – but also where we believe it. In any case, the belief in God is not the only one that can make us happy