One of the major claims made by advocates of religion is that it promotes good behaviour. Believers, so it is claimed, are nicer people - they are more generous and more honest, for example.A number of studies support this hypothesis, at least on the surface. But many of these studies are weak because they are based on self report (i.e. what individuals say about themselves in questionnaires). Self-report is notoriously unreliable as a measure of what a person actually thinks. Not only do people sometimes not tell the truth, but frequently they don't actually know what's going on inside their own head (in other words, their beliefs about how they behave can differ quite a lot from how they actually behave). In his 2003 book The Psychology of Religion, Professor Bernard Spilka (Purdue University) concluded (p422):
In the end, although more religious people apparently tend to say that they are more honest than less religious persons, such findings seem to be contradicted by other research showing no relationship, or even a positive relationship between lie scale scores and religiosity. More importantly, there is not much evidence from studies of actual behavior to support the supposition that religious people are somehow more honest, or less likely to lie or cheat, than are their less religious or nonreligious peers. In view of the clear teachings of most faiths on such issues, we are left to ponder why religion does not have a significant impact in reducing cheating behavior.There is, however, some more evidence that religious or superstitious beliefs can make people act more honestly, although by mechanisms that proponents of religion will find surprising (and probably won't like). For example, subconscious priming with religious messages can make you more honest, whether you believe in god or not (what's more, priming with non-religious but 'wholesome' messages has the same effect).
And there's some interesting evidence that a belief in the supernatural can make you more honest by convincing you that someone is watching you. Kevin Haley at UCLA has shown that, in an economic game (the anonymous dictator game), showing stylised eyespots on the computer monitor increases honesty (see refs for this and other papers below). In similar study but this time conducted in the 'real world', Melissa Bateson at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne has shown the same thing. In their study, coffee-drinkers in a university common room were asked to make a voluntary, anonymous contribution to the cost of milk. They found that, on the weeks when they pasted a pair of eyes above the 'honesty box', people contributed more (see fig). The scary eyes at the end seem to be particularly effective!Even more striking is the work of Jesse Bering at the University of Arkansas, who has shown that simply telling people that the lab is haunted will make test subjects more honest. The subjects were given a task to do, with the opportunity to cheat (they were told that the newly-developed computer program that administered the test sometimes malfunctioned and gave the answer ahead of time). Some were also informed that the study was dedicated to a recently dead grad student. And some of this group were further told by the experimenter (as a "casual but serious aside") that the ghost of this dead student had been seen around the lab. Sure enough, those who had been spooked were significantly less likely to cheat.
So it seems that there are good psychological reasons to expect that people exposed to religious concepts (exposure to ethical messaging, fear of being found out by the 'policeman in the sky') might be more honest. On the other hand, it's also true that people who are convinced that they are holders of moral truths are more likely to behave disreputably. Which may explain why empirical evidence that religious people really are more honest remains lacking.
A last thought. These studies are done in individuals within a society. But what happens if society as a whole becomes less religious? Does corruption and dishonesty increase, or decrease? This is an extremely important question for humanists, and one that is addressed in a follow up post.
Refs:
Hood, R.W., Spilka, B., Hunsberger, B., & Gorsuch, R. L. (2003). The psychology of religion: An empirical approach. 2nd Edit., New York: Guilford.
Bateson, M., Nettle, D., Roberts, G. (2006). Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting. Biology Letters, 12, 412-414. PDF
Haley, K., & Fessler, D. (2005). Nobody’s Watching? Subtle Cues Affect Generosity in an Anonymous Economic Game. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(3), 245-256.
Bering JM, et al. Reasoning about Dead Agents Reveals Possible Adaptive Trends. Human Nature, Winter 2005, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 360-381.
Whatever the evidence for whether a belief makes you more honest, it's the claim that you have to have a religion in order to be honest (or moral in other ways) that annoys most of us, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteI’m not sure whether you’re (the main article) serious or just jerking an imaginary chain about the faults of self-report to the hypothetical benefits of religious belief.
ReplyDeleteWhat you’re saying about the faults of self-report is valid pretty much across the board, as Broad and Wade showed regarding fraud and deceit in the halls of science – where falsified science findings are the mere "self-reported" narrative prelude for the hopeful coitus of a successful scientific grant request.
I’m all for the objective study of religion and for metrics showing its virtues and vices no matter what canon and dogma say. But, even pretty-good tests like the MMPI can sten score for lying. The deceits of self-report, including self-deceit, and other noble lies are detectable with adequate measures. If you feel that don’t have an adequate truth-sniffing faculty vis religion, get out of the business.
Cheers,
Jim
The opinion isn't mine, but that of Prof Bernard Spilka. It's a generally recognised problem. For example, Vincent Sarolou, Prof of the psychology of Religion at Université catholique de Louvain says something similar but more strident:
ReplyDelete"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."
Tom - please forgive me for posting here redundantly. I postled on the BHA web; but, can’t find my post!
ReplyDeleteRedux.
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Okay, 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.”
Let’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 hatever other prosocial behaviors).
I personally have a serious problem with the scalars for all this. 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 concepts, 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, I posted a response on the other thread: Are the religious more caring...
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