Determined, page 24
Atheists Gone Wild
Do atheists run amok? Most people sure believe that, and antiatheist prejudice runs wide and deep. There are fifty-two countries in which atheism is punishable by death or prison. Most Americans have negative perceptions of atheists, and antiatheist prejudice is more prevalent than antipathy toward Muslims (which comes in in second place), African Americans, LGBQT individuals, Jews, or Mormons. Such negativity is permeating in its consequences. Mock juries give atheists longer jail sentences; defense attorneys increase their likelihood of success in emphasizing their client’s theism; people put the supposed atheist’s name further down on a hypothetical list for an organ transplant; custody of a child has been denied to parents because of their atheism. Some states still have laws on the books barring atheists from holding public office; in more enlightened cantons, voters are less likely to elect people because of their atheism. In the U.S., atheists have higher rates of clinical depression than do the religious, and some of this likely reflects atheists’ marginalized, minority status (approximately 5 percent of Americans, according to surveys).[*],[13]
Here’s how unlikely a place antiatheist prejudice can pop up. Psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle of the University of Kentucky recount the story of a shoe company in Germany that was getting a lot of complaints from Americans—shoes bought online were greatly delayed or never delivered. The name of the company? Atheist Shoes. The owner did an experiment where half the shipments to America were sent without the company’s name on the label, half with. The former were delivered promptly; the latter were frequently delayed or lost. U.S. postal workers were taking a stand against the presumed immorality of those atheistic shoemakers, making sure no God-fearin’ American might inadvertently walk a mile in those shoes. No such phenomenon was observed with shoes sent within Europe.[14]
Why the bias against atheists? It’s not because they are viewed as less warm or competent than religious people. Instead, it is always about morality—the widespread belief that believing in a god is essential for morality, held by the majority of Americans and more than 90 percent of people in places like Bangladesh, Senegal, Jordan, Indonesia, and Egypt. People in most countries surveyed associate atheism with moral norm violations, such as serial murder, incest, or necrobestiality.[*] In one study, religious Christians reported a sense of visceral disgust when reading an atheistic tract. Even atheists associate atheism with norm violations, which is pretty pathetic; behold, the self-hating atheist.[*],[15]
Thus, the expectation that atheists might run amok at any moment is deeply entrenched (just to soften the sting a bit, religious people have similar, if lesser, biases against those “spiritual but not religious” fellow travelers). But on to the key question: Do atheists actually show fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial ones than do religious people?[16]
Right off the bat, there’s a huge impediment to getting a clear answer to a question like this. Suppose you wonder if some new drug can protect against some disease. What do you do? You get two groups of volunteers, matched for age, sex, medical history, and so on; a randomly selected half get the drug, half a placebo (without subjects knowing which they got). But you can’t do that with studies of things like religiosity. You don’t take two groups of blank-slate volunteers, command half to embrace religion and half to reject it, and then see who is nice out in the world.[*] It’s not random who winds up being religious or atheist—as one example that we will return to, men are more than twice as likely as women to be atheists. Similarly, free-will believers and skeptics don’t get to those stances by a coin toss.
Another complication in these theist/atheist studies is obvious to anyone who has been stranded on a desert island with a Unitarian and an evangelical Southern Baptist—religion and religiosity are crazy heterogeneous. Which religion? Is someone a lifelong adherent or a recent convert? Is the person’s religiosity mostly about their personal relationship with their deity, with their coreligionists, with humans in general? Is their god all about love or smiting? Do they typically pray alone or in a group? Is their religiosity more about thoughts, emotions, or ritualism?[*],[17]
Nonetheless, the bulk of studies in this large literature support the notion that deciding that there is no god to monitor you makes for rottener people. As compared with religious people, atheists are less honest and trustworthy, are less charitable in both experimental settings and out in the real world, volunteer less of their time. Case closed. The only question now is whether people who don’t believe in a god or people who don’t believe in free will run amok faster.
What we now need to do is to deconstruct this general finding. Because, naturally, the actual picture is way different and very pertinent to free-will skepticism.
Saying versus Doing
The first issue to deal with should be a no-brainer. If you are interested in these issues, do you observe how charitable study subjects are, or do you just ask them how often they give to charity? Asking someone just tells you how charitable they want to appear. A large percentage of the relevant literature is based on “self-reporting” rather than empirical data, and it turns out that religious people are more concerned than atheists with maintaining a moral reputation, arising from the more common personality trait of being concerned about being socially desirable.[18] This no doubt reflects the fact that theists are more likely than atheists to live their moral lives in the context of a cohesive social group. Moreover, concern of religious people with social desirability is greater in more religious countries.[19]
Once you actually observe what people do, rather than listen to what they say, there’s no difference between theists and atheists in rates of blood donations, amount of tipping, or compliance with “honor system” payments; ditto for a lack of difference in being altruistic, forgiving, or evincing gratitude. Furthermore, there’s no difference in being aggressive or vengeful in experimental settings where subjects can retaliate against a norm violation (for example, by administering what they believe to be a shock to someone).[20]
Thus, observe what people do rather than what they say, and the differences in prosociality between theists and atheists mostly disappears. The lesson for studying free-will believers versus skeptics is obvious. Collectively, the studies examining what people actually do in an experimental setting show no difference in ethical behavior between the two groups.
Old, Rich, Socialized Women versus Young, Poor, Solitary Guys
Back to that self-selection challenge: when compared with atheists, religious people are more likely to be female, older, married, and of higher socioeconomic status, and to have a larger and more stable social network. And this is a minefield of confounds because, independent of religiosity, these are all traits associated with higher levels of prosocial behavior.[21]
Being in a stable social network seems to be really important. For example, the increased charitability and volunteering found in religious people is not a function of how often they pray but, instead, how often they attend their house of worship, and atheists who show the same degree of involvement in a close-knit community show the same degree of good-neighborliness (in a similar vein, controlling for involvement in a social community significantly lessens the difference in rates of depression among theists versus atheists). Once you control for sex, age, socioeconomic status, marital status, and sociality, most of the differences between theists and atheists disappear.[22]
The relevance of this point to free-will issues is clear; the extent to which someone does or doesn’t believe in free will, and how readily that view can be altered experimentally, is probably closely related to variables about age, sex, education, and so on, and these might actually be more important predictors of running-amok-ness.
When You’re Primed to Be Good for Goodness’ Sake
Where religious people tend to become more prosocial than atheists is when you remind the former of their religiosity. This can be done explicitly: “Do you consider yourself to be religious?” More interesting is when religious people become more prosocial after being implicitly primed about their religiosity—for example, ask someone to unscramble a list of words that includes religious terms (versus no such words listed) or to list the Ten Commandments (versus ten books they read in high school). Other approaches include having a subject walk down a block that does or doesn’t contain a church, or playing religious versus secular music in the background in the test room.[23]
Collectively, these studies show that religious primes bring out the best in religious people, making them more charitable, generous, and honest, more resistant to temptation, and more capable of exerting self-control. In such studies, some of the most effective implicit primes bring divine reward and punishment to mind (raising the interesting question of whether better behavior is evoked by unscrambling “lehl” versus “neehav”).[24]
Now we’re getting somewhere. When religious people are not thinking about their religious principles, they sink into the same immoral muck as atheists. But remind them of what really matters, and the halo comes out.
Two big complications: The first is that in a lot of these studies, implicit religious primes make atheists more prosocial as well. After all, you don’t have to be a Christian to decide that the Sermon on the Mount has good parts. But as a more informative complication, while prosociality in religious people is boosted by religious primes, prosociality in atheists is boosted just as much by the right kinds of secular primes. “I’d better be good or else I’ll get into trouble” can certainly be primed by “alij” or “eocpli.” Prosociality in atheists is also prompted by loftier secular concepts, like “civic,” “duty,” “liberty,” and “equality.”[*],[25]
In other words, reminders, including implicit ones, of one’s ethical stances, moral principles, and values bring forth the same degree of decency in theists and atheists. It’s just that the prosociality of the two groups is moored in different values and principles, and thus primed in different contexts.
Obviously, then, what counts as moral behavior is crucial. Work by psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University groups moral concerns into five domains—those related to obedience, loyalty, purity, fairness, and harm avoidance. His influential work has shown that political conservatives and highly religious people tilt in the direction of particularly valuing obedience, loyalty, and purity. The Left and the irreligious, in contrast, are more concerned with fairness and harm avoidance. This can be framed with highfalutin philosophy. One can approach a moral quandary as a deontologist, believing that the morality of an action should be evaluated independently of its consequence (“I don’t care how many lives it saves, it’s never okay to . . .”). This contrasts with being a consequentialist (“Well, I’m normally opposed to X, but the good that it will accomplish in this case outweighs . . .”). So who are the deontologists, theists or atheists? It depends. Religious people tend toward deontology about obedience, loyalty, and purity—it is never okay to disobey an order, turn on your group, or desecrate the sacred. However, when it comes to issues of fairness and harm avoidance, atheists tend to be as deontological as the religious.[26]
Differences in values show up in an additional way. The highly religious tend to view good works more in a personal, private context, helping to explain why religious Americans donate more of their income to charity than do the secular. In contrast, atheists are more likely to view good works as a collective responsibility, helping to explain why they are the ones who are more likely to support candidates advocating wealth redistribution to decrease inequality. Thus, if you’re trying to decide who is more likely to run amok with antisocial behaviors, atheists will look bad if the question is “How much of your money would you give to charity for the poor?” But if the question is “How much of your money would you pay in higher taxes for more social services for the poor?” you’ll reach a different conclusion.[27]
The relevance to free-will believers versus skeptics? Obvious—it depends on what the prime is and what value is being evoked. This generates a simple prediction: implicitly prime someone by asking them to spot the misspellings in “Captaim of yeur gate,” and free-will believers will be more influenced, and in the direction of showing more self-control. In contrast, try “Victin of vircumsrance,” and it is free-will skeptics who will become less punitive and more forgiving.
One Atheist at a Time versus an Infestation of Them
The preceding sections suggest that deciding that there is no omnipotent being to punish transgressions doesn’t send atheists into a downward moral spiral. It should be noted, however, that a huge percentage of the research discussed has been with American subjects, from a country where only roughly 5 percent of people say they are atheists. We saw that prosociality can even be enhanced in atheists by religious primes. Maybe the relative morality of atheists is due to being surrounded by the morality of all those theists rubbing off on them. What would happen if most people became atheist or irreligious—what sort of society would they construct, when everyone is freed from being nice due to the fear of God?
A moral and humane one, and this conclusion is not based on a thought experiment. What I’m referring to are those ever reliably utopian Scandinavians. Religiosity throughout the region plummeted through the twentieth century, and Scandinavian countries are the most secular in the world. How do they stack up when compared with a highly religious country such as the U.S.? Studies of quality of life and of health show that Scandinavians fare better (on measures such as happiness and well-being, life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and rates of death in childbirth); moreover, poverty rates are lower, and income inequality is tiny in comparison. And measures of the prevalence of antisocial behavior, crime rates, and rates of violence and damaging aggression—from warfare to criminal violence to school bullying to corporal punishment—are lower. And as for some indices of prosociality, Scandinavian countries’ per-capita expenditures on social services for their own citizens[*] and as aid for poor countries are greater.[28]
Furthermore, these differences are not merely Scandinavians feasting on lutefisk versus sweaty, capitalistic Americans. Across a broad range of countries, lower average rates of religiosity predict higher rates of all these salubrious outcomes. Moreover, cross-nationally, lower average rates of religiosity in a country predict lower levels of corruption, more tolerance of racial and ethnic minorities, higher literacy rates, lower rates of overall crime and of homicide, and less frequent warfare.[29]
Correlative studies like these always have the major problem of not telling anything about cause or effect. For example, do lower rates of religiosity result in governments spending more on social services for the poor, or does governments spending more on such services result in lower rates of religiosity (or do both arise from a third factor)? It’s hard to answer, even with the well-documented Scandinavian profile, since the decline in religiosity and the Scandinavian social welfare model emerged in parallel. It’s probably some of both. The preference of atheists for collective responsibility for good works would certainly help foster Scandinavian models. And as societies become more economically stable and safer, rates of religious belief decline.[30]
Separate from these complex chicken-and-egg issues, we have a clear answer to our question of whether less religious countries swarm with citizens running amok. Not at all. In fact, they’re downright Edenic.[*]
Thus, it is not the case that atheists match theists in their morality simply because, thank god(s), the former are constrained by the abundance of the latter. My guess is that similarly, ethical behavior by free-will skeptics is not a function of their being a minority surrounded by go-getters brimming with a sense of agency.
This brings us to what is probably the most important point in evaluating whether religious people are more prosocial than atheists, as well as considering the prospects of free-will believers being more prosocial than free-will skeptics.
Who Needs the Help?
Even after controlling for factors like self-reporting or demographic correlates of religiosity, and after considering broader definitions of prosociality, religious people still come through as being more prosocial than atheists in some experimental as well as real-world settings. Which leads us to a really crucial point: religious prosociality is mostly about religious people being nice to people like themselves. It’s mostly in-group. In economic games, for example, the enhanced honesty of religious subjects extends only to other players described to them as coreligionists, something made more extreme by religious primes. Moreover, the greater charitability of religious people in studies is accounted for by their contributing more to coreligionists, and the bulk of the charitability of highly religious people in the real world consists of charity to their own group.[31]
But being on guard for confounds, maybe this is a spurious relationship—maybe religious people are kinder to coreligionists because they are likely to be living among them. Thus, maybe the kindness is driven not by the religiosity but by the familiarity. This is probably not the case, though. For example, one cross-cultural study of fifteen different societies showed that in-group favoritism of religious people extended to distant coreligionists they had never met.[32]
Thus, despite claims toward universal niceness, theistic niceness tends to be in-group. Moreover, this is particularly pronounced in religious groups characterized by fundamentalist belief and authoritarianism.[33]
How about when it comes to out-group members? In those circumstances, it is atheists who are more prosocial, including more accepting of and extending protection to Thems. Moreover, religious primes can make religious people more prejudiced against out-group members, including increasing vengefulness and willingness to punish their transgressions. In one classic study, religious schoolchildren viewed it as unacceptable for a population of innocent people to be destroyed . . . unless it was presented as Joshua’s destruction of the innocent population of Jericho in the Old Testament. In another, religious primes resulted in fundamentalist West Bank Jewish settlers expressing more admiration for a Jewish terrorist who had killed Palestinians. In one study, merely walking past a church resulted in religious Christians expressing more negative feelings about atheists, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ individuals. In another, priming Christian subjects with the Christian version of the Golden Rule did not reduce homophobia; however, priming them with what they were told was the Buddhist equivalent of the Golden Rule increased homophobia. Finally, some oft-cited studies looked at how aggressive subjects would be to an opponent in a game (e.g., the volume of loud noise they would choose to blast the other player with). Such aggressiveness was increased when subjects had first read a passage mentioning God or the Bible, relative to passages without that; aggressiveness was increased even more when subjects read a passage about biblical vengefulness sanctioned by God versus the same description of vengefulness without the divine sanction.[34]
