Worldview Of Science And Tech

From the archive: originally published on News, in Data in December 2016. The text and charts appear as they ran then.

God, Science and the State of the World

The World Values Survey is an association of social scientists from around the world that gather data on human values, political and social life, as well as a host of other social statistics. Using the WVS data, I present here a brief analysis of Science and Tech in the World and also show that when it comes to the above.

In the first analysis, we looked at the intersection of the importance of God in one's life and the perceived impact of Science on society. Respondents were asked to respond to the following prompts and subsequently reported there degree of agreement or disagreement. The two questions plotted below were, "The world is better off, or worse off, because of science and technology", and "God is Very Important in my life" and the responses were reported with a value of 1 through 10.

For the first question one meant the world was a lot worse off and ten meant the world was a lot better off due to science and technology. For the second question, 1 meant god was not important and 10 was very important in the respondent's life. The first plot reflects the percent of people from each country reporting a values of one and 10, respectively.

The data from above, where respondents were asked, is "The world is better off, or worse off, because of science and technology", are also plotted below in an ordered figure. The panel on the left ordered the surveyed countries by percent of respondents believing the world was worse off and the right panel reflects countries ordered by percent believing science and tech has made our world better.

Respondent Results with 1-10 Scale

Lastly, the full suite of respondent data are plotted below, for a select group of countries. These data show the 1-10 values respondents were able to report when asked, is "The world is better off, or worse off, because of science and technology".

Samuel Bennett is a hobby data analyst, teacher and MTB racer. He can be reached here.