But the truth is much more interesting.
This new poll is one in a long line of research which shows that believers regularly report not only that they value these traits, but that they believe they actually live up to them. Now, there could be several reasons for this. Perhaps, religion really does instill moral values. Or maybe there's some self-selection going on, and so religion tends to attract the nice folk, and all the selfish, mean-spirited folk drift off to become atheists.
Well maybe.
But in fact when you test religious and non-religious in carefully designed psychological tests, the differences evaporate. Something similar happens with church attendance: Christians in the US, for example, report going to church about twice as often as they actually do. So what's going on here? As Vassilis Saroglou, associate professor of psychology of religion at the Université catholique de Louvain, puts it:
"The contrast between the ideals and self-perceptions of religious people and the results of studies using other research strategies is so striking that researchers may be tempted to suspect moral hypocrisy in religious people."Saroglou has found that there is a small effect of religion on prosociality, but only towards close siblings and friends. In other words, religion appears to enhance the tribal bond - no surprises there! But Saroglou's work is, as he puts it, still derived from "paper-and-pencil measures and can consequently only provide indirect evidence of the prosocial behavior of religious people in real life."
Recent research by Ara Norenzayan, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, goes further by using a hard test of prosociality - an economic game with real money payouts (Shariff & Norenzayan 2007). As expected, religious people claimed to be more prosocial than the non-religious, but weren't in reality. But when subliminally primed with religious concepts, both the religious and non-religious were more prosocial. And the same thing happened when they were primed with secular concepts.
So there you have it. Religion increases bonding within the tribe, but not outside of it. And it's not inherent - it depends on priming. And the priming works with secular concepts just as well as it does with religious ones. But the apparent prosocial effects of religion are mostly the result of self delusion, with believers describing themselves as they would like to be, rather than as they actually are. So maybe secular nations are every bit as caring and sharing as the religious ones, and maybe the loss of religion won't really cause a descent into chaos.
But in fact, we knew that already - Denmark, with one of the lowest levels of religious belief in the world, is also the one with the highest levels of happiness and greatest equality. So don't believe the hype!
Thanks to The Atheist Jew for reporting this survey.
It's always nice to have your prejudices confirmed isn't it?
ReplyDeleteOkay, I’m down with the proposition that, “maybe secular nations are every bit as caring and sharing as the religious ones, and maybe the loss of religion won't really cause a descent into chaos.”
ReplyDeleteLet’s stipulate to that.
And move on.
Saroglou’s finding of an “indirect” effect is actually misread by the quote above. His argument is counter-intuitive if you really read his report - “We argue that the interpretative hypothesis of moral hypocrisy, although legitimate, may obscure rather than clarify our psychological understanding of the religion and prosociality issue, especially if it is extended from a discrepancy between altruistic ideals or self-perceptions and a self-centered motivation to a discrepancy between these ideals or self-perceptions and the absence of prosocial behavior.”
In other words, it's the claim of “moral hypocrisy” as an “interpretive hypothesis” that's the “hypothesis” to be tested!
It's not confirmed! Just tested!
Wake up!
That's because otherwise you’re just blathering about indirect effects – the claim of “moral hypocrisy” is just as much noise as any other sociometric without any data at all – just noise. And it's the same kind of noise that social scientists generate when there is no new data or the data is irrelevant!
See his finding about less reactive aggression levels among people who pray together. The only “hyprocisy” available as a remainder for further study would be something like a discrepancy between the self-reported claims of lower aggressive behaviors versus observed higher actual levels. In other words, people who pray together have overall net lower aggressive behaviors than some control group (an actual prosocial effect), but still, the same religious people might suffer elevated levels of hypocrisy!
As a matter of practical exchange in the polis, this would only mean that non-religious people can discount self-reports of religious people (count it “hypocrisy”), while still crediting religious people for an overall net lower aggressive-response rate (or, for whatever other prosocial behaviors)!
I personally have a serious problem with the scalars for all this, and I would rather hang out with non-religious people whose self-report is more accurate (less hypocritical) – but, if net gains to actual prosocial behaviors among religious people are not credited -- who is the hypocrite then?
The Norenzayan findings are equally counterintuitive.
If you cross the two studies, then you could argue that religious people are guilty of failed attempts at self-priming (hyprocisy: thinking they are better than they are), and to the extent that there is no difference to net prosociality between either group sufficiently primed with secular or religious concepts – then religious people cannot be “hypothesized” as hypocrites until you can devise a scale (probably complex scalars) to differentiate whether religious people credit “secular” primes as sufficiently close in content to “religious” primes to give the secular primes credit (e.g., acting on secular primes for "hidden" religious reasons) - like an action potential - to motivate prosocial behavior!
But look at that study again! – secular people were primed to prosocial behavior by religious concepts! – but, if skepticism is operant, then why would this be so? – if skeptics are motivated to prosocial behaviors by religious primes, then who are the hypocrites now?
In the end, if you want a normative ethic for prosocial behaviors, then I’d say it’s definitely worse to restrict the necessary primes to religious ones for Machiavellian reasons that deny the hypocrisy quotient; and it’s better to have a population of prosocial people with a rational understanding of why they are prosocial, than for both groups (secular, religious) just to be faking it both ways with false claims about the values of their different primes!
I’m skeptical that we’re close to either.
In either event, the studies are light-years away from valorizing Denmark as a haven for anything more than botterkookies!
Religious people will say their priming is correlated to actual prosocial behaviors: which is true. For a naive justification, that will do.
Cheers,
Jim
Hi Jim, Saroglou is clear in confirming the large discrepancy between self-report and actual behaviour of the religious. I agree with him that it's not moral hypocrisy - at least, the religious are no more hypocritical than everyone else. In general, people's understanding of their own behaviour is surprisingly poor (see Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves)
ReplyDeleteSo the question then is, are the religious better behaved than the non-religious on objective tests? They are, he says, but only in limited scenarios. Specifically, they are slightly more altruistic towards 'in-group' colleagues. In other words, religious believers stick together.
This begs several questions. Is this a good thing (i.e. shouldn't we be striving for an open society where you treat people the same regardless of whether they are a member of your in crowd)? Is this a function of group behaviour in general (i.e. do members of a football supporters group behave similarly)? And, as Saraglou notes, what is the direction of causality? It may be that individuals with a communalist, rather than individualist, personality are more likely to be religious.
Regarding the priming study, I suspect that the reason non-believers were motivated by religious primes is probably because they were raised in a religious setting (I suspect that, in North America, very few individuals can escape large exposure to religious messaging as they grow up). Therefore, the triggers work for them just as for the religious. But the point is that the triggers don't have to be religious. They could just as easily be secular.
Tom - very nice cross to Wilson’s “Strangers.” I haven’t read it. It’s on my list. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteYou’re totally correct in addressing scenario-specific altruism of religious believers and the whole question of the directionality of personality. There’s a potentially far more distal and powerful effect than “personality” at work here beyond the psych studies, namely, the evolutionary trajectory of forces such as group selection (too controversial to invoke now) which would make group allegiance onto-genetic. Personality studies would and are still helpful in filling in the complex distributions of allegiance in current-time. An evolutionary trajectory might not (would not?) predict for “religiousness” per se because religion could still be an artifact.
There’s no doubt religion has played a role in artificial selection. Which brought me to one of the dicta in the main article about the religion in the polis.
When you speculated on the priming study showing non-believers motivated by religious primes as a finding potentially related to growing up in a religious setting (especially North America), I think you’re really on the right track. Diffusion theories make common sense to me. It’s not fair that I pointed more narrowly to “skepticism” as an operant factor because the study didn’t quarantine Paul Kurtz, Sam Harris, Dawkins and company as a targeted sample community. Maybe their results would vary.
Or, maybe disciplined skeptics would have to try harder given the diffusion of religious background noise. And I say this as a believer! Like I wrote, I would rather hang out with more accurate skeptics than more “noisy” believers in their self-reports.
But, there is still a residual study issue in asking why non-religious folk respond to religious primes *if* skepticism is operant, no?
I mean, beyond the general diffusion of religious primes, wouldn’t a carefully judicious skepticism be able to demonstrate a differential report rate – not being moved by religious primes? – or, is there really more generosity and less parsimony de campe between the groups? - maybe each of them has “crediting” mechanisms wherein the hierarchies of their different priming concepts just credits the primes of the other camp as sufficiently close in content, so that with a little generosity of inference, each group makes the other’s primes "work"?
That was my sociometric of “hidden beliefs” question. In one version.
I do agree with you that the triggers are working both ways. It may be generations before the sciences master the bodies of data acquired in our newfound non-invasive techniques for sorting this whole mess out. We can’t improve much on Hume anyway.
Cheers,
Jim