Does Religion Make You Nice?Does atheism make you mean?
Posted Friday, Nov. 7, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET
Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger that morality requires a belief in God—otherwise, all we have is our selfish desires. In The Ten Commandments, she approvingly quotes Dostoyevsky: "Where there is no God, all is permitted." The opposing view, held by a small minority of secularists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, is that belief in God makes us worse. As Hitchens puts it, "Religion poisons everything."
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StumbleUponArguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.
In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.
Maybe, then, religious people are nicer because they believe that they are never alone. If so, you would expect to find the positive influence of religion outside the laboratory. And, indeed, there is evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion and what might broadly be called "niceness." In Gross National Happiness, Arthur Brooks notes that atheists are less charitable than their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example, and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the street. Since giving to charity makes one happy, Brooks speculates that this could be one reason why atheists are so miserable. In a 2004 study, twice as many religious people say that they are very happy with their lives, while the secular are twice as likely to say that they feel like failures.
Since the United States is more religious than other Western countries, this research suggests that Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity was on to something when he asserted that the United States is "the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth." In general, you might expect people in less God-fearing countries to be a lot less kind to one another than Americans are.
It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.
Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.
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Response from Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff
Paul Bloom tackles a critical issue in his thought-provoking piece on religion's contribution to a moral and happy populace. We wish to clarify two issues that directly pertain to the evidence in our Science article that Bloom cited.
First, surveys asking people to report on their own virtuous behavior can be unreliable. Many people tend to inflate reports of their own good deeds, but research shows that this may be especially true for the religious. When we set aside these surveys, and instead consulted experiments of actual behavior, we found that only in contexts where the reputations of participants are at stake—either in the eyes of their community or their deity—do religious folk tend to act more generously than their nonreligious peers. Strip away accountability and religious people are no 'nicer' than the non-religious.
Our word jumble experiment is a good example of this. Though participants who played a word game which unconsciously aroused thoughts of religion did indeed become more generous, when you look at the control condition, where participants received a neutral word jumble, believers and non-believers were equally generous. Moreover, religion is not the only motivator of good behavior. A third condition had participants complete a word jumble that primed secular justice, rather than religion. Those receiving this prime became just as generous as those who received the religious one. These studies, and other pertinent evidence, do not support Laura Schlessinger's claim that morality requires a belief in God. One need not travel to Denmark to see that religion has no monopoly on morality.
Second, we hope to urge a note of caution to Bloom's endorsement of the 'community component' of religion. Bloom argues that the capacity to build social bonds, not belief in a moralizing God, is what accounts for religion's positive effects on trust and emotional well-being in the United States. This may be so, but let's not forget that communal solidarity can benefit members while wreaking havoc on those who fall on the wrong side of group boundaries. For example, studies measuring popular support for suicide attacks show that religious attendance contributes to support whereas religious belief does not. In a religiously diverse world, the community component of religion is both the proverbial arsonist and the fire department.
Were American atheists to form moral communities in the way that religious folk do, it might make them happier. But it would also make them likely to adopt many of the unsavory aspects of groupishness that many of their banded religious brothers exhibit. Religion is not the only thing that can poison everything.
--Azim Shariff PhD student in the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
--Ara Norenzayan Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
Additional comments from article author Paul Bloom:
I appreciate the thoughtful response by Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, and I recommend their excellent Science article to anyone interested in reading more about these issues.
We agree on some main points. It might make you happier to be part of a community, and you might be generous to the other members, but the downside is that belonging to a group can lead to indifference -- or worse -- toward those outside of that group. And, of course, even people who are thought to be immoral and unpatriotic by most of their fellow citizens can live good and happy lives. As an atheist living in the United States, I certainly hope that this is true.
I'm puzzled, though, as to why Shariff and Norenzayan are so skeptical about the survey results that I mention. After all, they are strong advocates of the view that religion makes people more generous. As they put it in their Science article, they defend "the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people." Presumably, then, they believe that religion has effects outside of their word jumble laboratory studies. Doesn't their own theory predict that a church-going Christian should be, on average, more generous than a solitary atheist?
Shariff and Norenzayan propose that the effects of religion arise through additional accountability--people want to seen as nice in the eyes of their community and their deity. I agree with them about the importance of community-though, as I discuss in the article, the benefits of religious association are likely more general than they propose. We are better, happier people when we are surrounded by those who care about us.
Our big disagreement is about God. There is no evidence that, when you factor out community, those who believe in a deity are any better than those who don't. The important part of religion is the people who are around you, not the gods above.
--Paul Bloom
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