Culture People intuitively associate religiosity with goodness and atheism with wrongdoing

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By Vladimir Hedrih
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Two experiments, one conducted in the United States and the other in New Zealand, found that people tend to have an intuitive moral bias linking religiosity with virtue and prosocial behavior. Similarly, they associated atheism with transgressive behavior. The research was published in Scientific Reports.

Moral bias refers to the tendency for moral values or judgments to influence reasoning, perception, or decision-making in a non-objective way.

It can cause people to evaluate information, actions, or individuals more favorably or unfavorably based on whether they align with their own moral beliefs. This bias often leads to the selective acceptance of evidence that supports one’s values while dismissing or distorting conflicting information.

Moral bias plays a role in political, religious, and ethical debates, where facts are interpreted through a moral lens. It can also affect scientific reasoning, legal judgments, and policy decisions.

For example, a person might reject valid research simply because its conclusions feel morally uncomfortable. Moral bias is often unconscious and can subtly shape how people frame problems or perceive fairness.

One frequently studied example of moral bias is the implicit belief that atheists are inherently immoral, while religious individuals are moral. A previous study found that moral bias against atheists is real and global in scope, but it remained unclear how personal religiosity influences the degree of this bias.

Study author Alex Dayer and his colleagues aimed to explore whether religious belief is intuitively linked with extreme prosociality. They also sought to replicate previous findings suggesting a connection between atheism and serious transgressive behavior.

Additionally, they investigated whether individual differences in belief in God influenced conjunction fallacy rates when participants evaluated situations involving helping behavior. A conjunction fallacy occurs when people mistakenly believe that the probability of two events occurring together is higher than the probability of one of the events alone.

The researchers conducted two studies.

In the first study, participants were 744 workers recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Forty-four percent were female. Participants were paid $0.60 for their participation. They rated their belief in God and responded to two short vignettes.

One vignette described a person who was a serial murderer, while the other described a person who was a serial helper, offering food and clothes to the homeless.

For each vignette, participants indicated which of two statements they found more probable: either that the person was a teacher or that the person was a teacher who believes in God (or does not believe in God). Participants were randomly assigned to conditions where the second option specified either belief or disbelief in God.

Since teachers who do or do not believe in God are subsets of all teachers, the first option (“the individual is a teacher”) is always objectively more probable. This setup tested for the conjunction fallacy.

The second study used the same design but included 600 participants from New Zealand, recruited via Prolific. Fifty-two percent were female, and participants received $1 for their participation.

In the first study, results showed that when the serial helper was described as religious, 60% of participants selected that option. When the helper was described as an atheist, only 4% selected it. This suggests a strong moral bias linking religious people with prosocial behavior.

When the person in the vignette was a serial murderer, 64% of participants selected the conjunction option when it indicated he was an atheist, compared to only 18% when he was described as religious.

This finding supports the idea that participants held an implicit moral bias against atheists. Religious participants showed higher conjunction fallacy rates when the conjunction option identified the person as an atheist.

The second study in New Zealand replicated the main findings, although the differences were smaller. For the serial helper, 49% selected the religious conjunction option, compared to 5% who selected the atheist option. For the serial murderer vignette, 45% chose the atheist conjunction option, while 27% chose the religious conjunction option.

“We found evidence that religionists are conceptualized as morally good to a greater extent than are atheists conceptualized as morally bad, with comparable patterns observed in a predominantly religious society, the United States, and in a predominantly secular society, New Zealand."

"Notwithstanding the aforementioned moderation of these effects by individual differences in religiosity, even relatively nonreligious participants evidenced these biases in both societies, suggesting that the conceptual associations are pervasive,” the study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on the moral bias about religiosity. However, while the studies were conducted in two different countries, both the U.S. and New Zealand are English-speaking countries sharing similar cultures and cultural routes. Studies in other cultures might not yield identical results.

The paper, “Intuitive moral bias favors the religiously faithful,” was authored by Alex Dayer, Chanuwas Aswamenakul, Matthew A.Turner, Scott Nicolay, Emily Wang, Katherine Shurik, and Colin Holbrook.
 
While both sides have their moral failings and their own brands of hypocrisy and insanity; I can at least err on the side of the one who believes in a sky daddy. The atheist declares themselves a good person and thus it is so. The religious may at least cite they're not perfect and try their best; or quote they're on the side of God when doing whatever.

And while I don't have any hard numbers; just casual observation, the atheist prefers charity to be state mandated and draws their superiority from saying tax dollars should help the needy. Where as religious are more prone to assist with donation drives, soup kitchens, and other acts of kindness. Feel free to say I'm wrong, but I put more stock in people who use their actual living time to help over those who write a check and be done with it. And I'm not saying atheists simply don't do that; but if we were to get an accurate count, I'm sure the data would skew one way.

I can't find it as I'm currently phone posting; but there was a study showing White Christians were the most benevolent out of all groups.
 
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I'm not exactly religious in a way that would satisfy the Christian types on this forum but I can see how humans might instinctively dislike or distrust atheists. Humans as far as we know have always had some kind of religious beliefs even if it's just shamanic or belief in spirits and it's a thing that helps us form social cohesion. A person who rejects that rejects social norms so is therefore less trustworthy to normies.

I'd be interested to see this experiment repeated in cultures like Japan or Thailand which are Buddhists and may not have the same definition of religion that the US or New Zealand do.
I'm not religious either but do believe in a deity of sorts. Throughout the years of my life, I've learned that people need something to believe in. Ironically enough, there's also a U.S survey I saw today that LGBTQ and young women today are the biggest astrology fans. Its extremely bizarre to me how some young people claim the idea of a deity is absurd but the alignment of the planets and stars determines your personality isn't? Yeah ok. I think another thing about some atheists is that some believe that finding intelligent life out there would some how refute the existence of a deity and yet 1) This wouldn't prove nor disprove anything and 2) Wouldn't alien life that has similar intelligence to a human being also have their own deities they worship?
 
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Because Atheism as a social movement died a decade ago and moon cult pedophiles in turbans are the hot new fad.
Eh...the study itself is pretty interesting though? Its not about atheism itself but rather the fact that everyone seems to subconsciously associate religiosity with pro social behavior and atheism with amorality or criminality.
 
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