Study suggests atheists less trusted than rapists.

[The Romulan Republic]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... etworkNews

Un-fucking-believeable, and very depressing if its true.

Edit: fucked up the link. I hope its working now.

[Flagg]

This is how you post an article, dimwit:

Washington Post

Study: Atheists distrusted as much as rapists

By Kimberly Winston | Religion News Service, Published: December 9 | Updated: Saturday, December 10, 11:50 AM

A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances.

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers.

“It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?

The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.

The study is part of an attempt to understand what needs religion fulfills in people. Among the conclusions is a sense of trust in others.

“People find atheists very suspect,” Shariff said. “They don’t fear God so we should distrust them; they do not have the same moral obligations of others. This is a common refrain against atheists. People fear them as a group.”

Shariff, who studies atheism and religion, said the findings provide a clue to combating anti-atheism prejudice.

“If you manage to offer credible counteroffers of these stereotypes, this can do a lot to undermine people’s existing prejudice,” he said. “If you realize there are all these atheists you’ve been interacting with all your life and they haven’t raped your children that is going to do a lot do dispel these stereotypes.”

[TithonusSyndrome]

What naturally interests me the most is how much of a difference there would be in Canadian and American respondents. As many as one quarter of Canadians are atheists, and it's generally easier to get swept away with popular misconceptions about people if you don't encounter them and put the lie to the myth.

[Jaepheth]

The study ... asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?

I'm no expert, but that seems like an absolutely horrible question design.

Where's the Hindu teacher? The Satanist teacher? the Muslim teacher? The Christian teacher? The Catholic teacher? The banker? Colonel Mustard?

To pose a hypothetical series of immoral choices is fine... but to then only offer three choices like that (and to my knowledge rapist isn't a belief system) seems like it's leading the test subject.

Also, why are all three options teachers?

EDIT: I suppose the article may be oversimplifying the survey, but it doesn't reference a more academic source.

[Stofsk]

This is how you post an article, dimwit

Do you like starting fights over nothing or what? Any moron can click the link and get to the article in question.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

This sounds like it's surveying two things at once. The choices being a teacher or a subtype of teacher reminds me of questions like, "Sarah has a passion for music. Which is more likely, that she is a lawyer or that she is a lawyer who sings along to the radio in her car?" People often choose the latter even though it must be the former, but this sort of thing is entirely unrelated to finding out people's feelings for stuff and is just going to muddle everything.

[Shadow6]

The study itself [pdf]

Media release from UBC:

UBC study explores distrust of atheists by believers

Distrust is the central motivating factor behind why religious people dislike atheists, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia psychologists.

“Where there are religious majorities – that is, in most of the world – atheists are among the least trusted people,” says lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. “With more than half a billion atheists worldwide, this prejudice has the potential to affect a substantial number of people.”

While reasons behind antagonism towards atheists have not been fully explored, the study – published in the current online issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – is among the first explorations of the social psychological processes underlying anti-atheist sentiments.

“This antipathy is striking, as atheists are not a coherent, visible or powerful social group,” says Gervais, who co-authored the study with UBC Associate Prof. Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff of the University of Oregon. The study is titled, Do You Believe in Atheists? Distrust is Central to Anti-Atheist Prejudice.

The researchers conducted a series of six studies with 350 American adults and nearly 420 university students in Canada, posing a number of hypothetical questions and scenarios to the groups. In one study, participants found a description of an untrustworthy person to be more representative of atheists than of Christians, Muslims, gay men, feminists or Jewish people. Only rapists were distrusted to a comparable degree.

The researchers concluded that religious believer’s distrust – rather than dislike or disgust – was the central motivator of prejudice against atheists, adding that these studies offer important clues on how to combat this prejudice.

One motivation for the research was a Gallup poll that found that only 45 per cent of American respondents would vote for a qualified atheist president, says Norenzayan. The figure was the lowest among several hypothetical minority candidates. Poll respondents rated atheists as the group that least agrees with their vision of America, and that they would most disapprove of their children marrying.

The religious behaviors of others may provide believers with important social cues, the researchers say. “Outward displays of belief in God may be viewed as a proxy for trustworthiness, particularly by religious believers who think that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them,” says Norenzayan. “While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists’ absence of belief as a public threat to cooperation and honesty.”

Some extracts from the study:

Study 1 demonstrated explicit distrust of atheists, but it is possible that instead of being representative of personal feelings, participants' explicit responses may have instead reflected cultural norms determining which groups are fair game for criticism and which should be insulated. The varied permissibility of such criticism is itself an interesting indicator of prejudice, but does not specifically map on to the questions of distrust at the heart of this project.

As a result, in Study 2, we adapted a classic conjunction fallacy paradigm (e.g., Tversky & Kahnemann, 1983) to create an indirect measure of distrust for various groups of people. In the most well-known version of this task, participants are given a description of Linda, an outspoken and politically active single woman. When deciding whether it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller, or that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist, most participants incorrectly choose the latter option—that is, they commit the conjunction fallacy—because they heuristically judge that the description sounds representative of a feminist, even though logic dictates this option is necessarily less probable. People only commit the conjunction fallacy when the target‘s description (single, outspoken, and liberal) is deemed representative of the target‘s potential group membership (feminist).

We capitalized on this classic finding by presenting participants with a description of an untrustworthy individual and evaluating whether they committed the conjunction fallacy across a number of different target groups. In this study, we constructed a description of a person who commits a variety of selfish and illegal acts when he feels he can get away with it—an archetypal freerider. Across subjects, we manipulated the target groups to which the man might belong by asking participants whether they thought it more probable that the man was a teacher, or a teacher and 1) a Christian, 2) a Muslim, 3) a rapist, and 4) an atheist. In this way, we evaluated the degree to which people find an untrustworthy description to be representative of atheists, relative to a majority religious ingroup (Christians), a religious outgroup (Muslims), and an unambiguously distrusted group (rapists). The latter two conditions provided especially important contrasts. If distrust is extended indiscriminately to religious outgroups, or to groups who are perceived to hold views antithetical to an ingroup‘s perceived basis for morality, then both atheist targets and Muslim targets should elicit more conjunction errors, relative to Christian targets. On the other hand, our framework predicts that atheists should elicit more conjunction errors than even Muslims. In addition, religious prosociality is far from the only source for distrust of outgroups, and some people (such as rapists) are probably distrusted because they have a proven track record of betraying trust. The inclusion of a rapist target allowed us to evaluate whether distrust derived from religious prosociality was as severe as distrust based on direct knowledge of somebody‘s malicious history. We hypothesized that participants would only tend to commit the conjunction fallacy for the groups who have either a known history of demonstrably untrustworthy behavior (rapists) or a dubious reputation derived from a failure to send religious signals of trustworthiness (atheists).

The methodology of the second of the six studies, which is the one discussed in the WP article:

Participants read the following description of an untrustworthy man who is willing to behave selfishly (and criminally) when other people will not find out:

"Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van's window before getting back into his car and driving away.
Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can."

Next, participants chose whether they thought it more probable that Richard was either 1) a teacher, or 2) a teacher and XXXX. We manipulated XXXX between subjects. XXXX was either "a Christian" (N = 26), "a Muslim" (N = 26), "a rapist" (N = 26), or "an atheist (someonewho does not believe in God)" (N = 27). The only difference in descriptions across targets was that the Muslim target was called "a man" rather than "Richard."

(Apologies for the formatting, I ripped it out of the pdf and might have missed some.)

Also, that took literally three minutes to find (UBC website, media release under the news heading, then Googled the paper's title).

[Flagg]

This is how you post an article, dimwit

Do you like starting fights over nothing or what? Any moron can click the link and get to the article in question.

There are rules to posting articles. If you're too dumb or lazy to follow them, I'm going to call you out on it.

[someone_else]

This can mean two things:

-they fucked up the guinea pig selection. I really doubt that if they had done the survey on a more balanced pool of people (where very religious christians weren't the majority), the atheist would win against the rapist.

-if they did it correctly (i.e. they took the right concentration of religious and atheists to simulate the whole population's shares of both), then there is another excellent reason to never set a foot in the glorious free-for-all god-trusting US, and possibly Canada. Although I'm sure I'm catholic enough to not be found guilty over a rapist by a jury, this is fucking insane.

[Zinegata]

This can mean two things:

-they fucked up the guinea pig selection. I really doubt that if they had done the survey on a more balanced pool of people (where very religious christians weren't the majority), the atheist would win against the rapist.

They probably did. The 450 Canadian College Student part made me raise an eyebrow. They may have had an asshole atheist teacher and this was their revenge on him .

[wautd]

Not surprising that in a first world nation with a disproportionate high number of religious idiots, atheists are distrusted. To be fair, as an atheist I don't trust fundies either.

[open_sketchbook]

What a terrible fucking test design. First off, you'd have to be retarded not to guess the purpose of the study, which biases the answers. They clearly aren't looking to see your stance on rapists, because nobody really likes rapists, so clearly they want to know what you think about atheists. Second off, rapists are bad individuals, but to a religious person, atheists are a bad group, and groups are always scarier than people because of siege mentality. Finally, a lot of atheists are also liberals and a lot of liberals are pretty self-hating; I know a lot of people, including myself circa about two years ago, who would have answered atheist on this experiment.

This experiment was clearly fishing for results against atheists, and while it is nice to have people acknowledge that atheists aren't too trusted in our society, it'd be even better if it could be done in a fashion that wasn't so retarded and full of holes. It's just going to hurt us in arguments.

EDIT : Oh, maybe I should have read the full text instead of just the article. Nevermind, just me reacting to terrible science reporting instead of terrible science itself. The study actually looks kind of solid. Which is even scarier. Still, the binary choice in the second experiment doesn't sit right with me.

[Shadow6]

Regarding the sample population, reading the paper would be a good idea:

The remaining studies complemented this finding by utilizing student samples from The University of British Columbia (UBC), a university located in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, which is itself among the least religious regions in North America.

[...]

One hundred five UBC undergraduates (Age 18-25, M = 19.95; 71% Female) participated for extra credit.

[...]

Appendix: Population Demographics

Studies 2-5 relied upon the Psychology Human Subject Pool at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Participants in this subject pool participate for course credit in psychology classes. A prescreening questionnaire is administered to the participants in order to obtain general demographic information. The following demographic data (based on N = 1153 responses) summarize the population from which our samples were drawn.

In terms of religious backgrounds, this is a very diverse group of students. In descending order of frequency, our participants report religious affiliations as Christian (34%), None (16%), Nonreligious (12%), Agnostic (11%), Atheist (9%), Other (7%), Buddhist (7%), Muslim (3%), and Jewish (1%).

This is also an ethnically heterogenous population from which to sample: East Asian (49%), Caucasian/White (30%), Other/mixed (7%), South Asian (6%), Southeast Asian (4%), Middle Eastern (2%), Hispanic/Latino (1%), and African (< 1%).

Finally, our participants in Studies 2-6 are, as a whole, not strongly religious. In both the prescreening questionnaire and in Study 1 (utilizing a nationally representative sample of Americans), participants were asked to rate their agreement (on a 1-7 Likert scale) with the statement "I believe in God." Subject pool respondents averaged a score of 4.06 (SD = 2.19), just above the midpoint of the scale. Only 22% rated their belief in God as a 7, and 19% rated their belief in God as 1. In contrast, participants in the American sample averaged a score of 5.51 (SD = 2.07), and more than half (51%) of participants rated their belief in God as a 7. Only 4% rated their belief in God as a 1.

[wautd]

Regarding the sample population, reading the paper would be a good idea:

In terms of religious backgrounds, this is a very diverse group of students. In descending order of frequency, our participants report religious affiliations as Christian (34%), None (16%), Nonreligious (12%), Agnostic (11%), Atheist (9%), Other (7%), Buddhist (7%), Muslim (3%), and Jewish (1%).

This is also an ethnically heterogenous population from which to sample: East Asian (49%), Caucasian/White (30%), Other/mixed (7%), South Asian (6%), Southeast Asian (4%), Middle Eastern (2%), Hispanic/Latino (1%), and African (< 1%).

Finally, our participants in Studies 2-6 are, as a whole, not strongly religious.

Perhaps it was a case of the old atheism = communism = eeeevviillll brainturd that's still alive and kicking in the US of A

[Shadow6]

What a terrible fucking test design. First off, you'd have to be retarded not to guess the purpose of the study, which biases the answers. They clearly aren't looking to see your stance on rapists, because nobody really likes rapists, so clearly they want to know what you think about atheists.

Just to be clear, are you saying that the question "Teacher, Atheist Teacher or Rapist Teacher?", as presented in the article, is a poor design, or that the actual question asked (in one of six different studies, which was "Teacher or XXXX Teacher?" is poor design?

Finally, a lot of atheists are also liberals and a lot of liberals are pretty self-hating; I know a lot of people, including myself circa about two years ago, who would have answered atheist on this experiment.

Self-hating to the point that you sincerely would trust a rapist over an atheist, or just self sabotaging with respect to everyone's opinion of you?

Regarding the sample population, reading the paper would be a good idea:

In terms of religious backgrounds, this is a very diverse group of students. In descending order of frequency, our participants report religious affiliations as Christian (34%), None (16%), Nonreligious (12%), Agnostic (11%), Atheist (9%), Other (7%), Buddhist (7%), Muslim (3%), and Jewish (1%).

This is also an ethnically heterogenous population from which to sample: East Asian (49%), Caucasian/White (30%), Other/mixed (7%), South Asian (6%), Southeast Asian (4%), Middle Eastern (2%), Hispanic/Latino (1%), and African (< 1%).

Finally, our participants in Studies 2-6 are, as a whole, not strongly religious.

Perhaps it was a case of the old atheism = communism = eeeevviillll brainturd that's still alive and kicking in the US of A

Except this was in Canada. On a university campus. Psychology students.

[Zinegata]

I find it hilarious how people thought ultra-religiousness was the problem before reading the paper. Persecution complex much?

I still say it's probably the student factor that messed it up. It looks very much to be just students from the university, and the results would have further been skewed since the examples chosen were teachers.

Given that they were Canadian students, many may have simply thought the idea of a Hindi or rapist teacher even existing in their locality to be utterly ridiculous that they picked atheist as the most "realistic" choice.

[Edi]

This is how you post an article, dimwit

Do you like starting fights over nothing or what? Any moron can click the link and get to the article in question.

There are rules to posting articles. If you're too dumb or lazy to follow them, I'm going to call you out on it.

Last I time I checked, you weren't part of the staff, so you shouldn't act as if you were, Hall Monitor Flagg. If someone doesn't post the article as they should (e.g. they're surfing on a smartphone which is a pain in the ass to use to post full articles), ask them to do so, but don't be a dick about it. The moderators will step in if necessary.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Given that they were Canadian students, many may have simply thought the idea of a Hindi or rapist teacher even existing in their locality to be utterly ridiculous that they picked atheist as the most "realistic" choice.

No one was given the option between Hindi and atheist or rapist and atheist. Everyone got "teacher" and "[adjective] teacher" for their two options; different subjects just got different subsets to work with.

Next, participants chose whether they thought it more probable that Richard was either 1) a teacher, or 2) a teacher and XXXX. We manipulated XXXX between subjects. XXXX was either "a Christian" (N = 26), "a Muslim" (N = 26), "a rapist" (N = 26), or "an atheist (someonewho does not believe in God)" (N = 27). The only difference in descriptions across targets was that the Muslim target was called "a man" rather than "Richard."

[The Duchess of Zeon]

One problem with this survey may be that many young and irresponsible college students may not think either of those activities is actually immoral.

[Duckie]

One unusual thing too is that the study was mostly asian girls (71% female, almost 50% east asian). That's getting more and more usual for pretty much any college major but mathematics (where it's still growing) due to men not going to college as much, and there are more and more asian girls in particular in every major every year I swear, but it's a pretty big difference between the sample and what most people are taking it as "What people typically think when they think Canadians and Americans". For one, it'd be nice if they had immigration generation data- is this a recent immigrant thing or an americanised asian thing, for example? I don't expect it to differ, but you'd never know.

[someone_else]

It makes no sense to me. Maybe asian-ish females have some kind of different way of thinking that escapes me... Y'know japan and stuff...

Or, if I understand this correctly:

Next, participants chose whether they thought it more probable that Richard was either 1) a teacher, or 2) a teacher and XXXX. We manipulated XXXX between subjects. XXXX was either "a Christian" (N = 26), "a Muslim" (N = 26), "a rapist" (N = 26), or "an atheist (someonewho does not believe in God)" (N = 27). The only difference in descriptions across targets was that the Muslim target was called "a man" rather than "Richard."

nearly all the "atheist" answers were given as a possible choice to the more religious subjects, while most other subjects did choose their own XXXX so all other choices got lower scores.

that's 105 people, everyone can vote "teacher" or "XXXX", say all that got atheist voted for atheist and that's a 27, the rest voted at most 26 for their own "XXXX" and very few choose just "teacher" so it didn't rise above 27 total.

Still weird as heck but could have happened by chance.

[Zinegata]

One problem with this survey may be that many young and irresponsible college students may not think either of those activities is actually immoral.

Or they didn't really take the answer seriously. Using local college students as a sample sounds like a rush job.

Regardless, I still blame the student sample .

[Alyrium Denryle]

One problem with this survey may be that many young and irresponsible college students may not think either of those activities is actually immoral.

Or they didn't really take the answer seriously. Using local college students as a sample sounds like a rush job.

Regardless, I still blame the student sample .

No. It is the standard method for most psychological studies of things like social cognition when you are not trying to look at something that is not age related. Why? Because it is the best representation of the rest of the population you will be able to get per unit effort. You dont have to call hundreds or even thousands of random phone numbers and get people to come in for a study with no compensation.

The psychology undergrads are required to participate... or write large papers.

[AniThyng]

It makes no sense to me. Maybe asian-ish females have some kind of different way of thinking that escapes me... Y'know japan and stuff...

Offhand I'm going to guess most of them would be Chinese. Then again if they come from Mainland China I don't think atheism would be an issue as such given that it's a communist nation? If they come from places like Singapore or Malaysia, then I think there is a strong streak of "religion = good", no religion= "bad", depending on specific upbringing (e.g. Urban, english educated evangelist christian? chinese-educated buddhist? urban, english educated "i'm a free thinker but i put down buddhist in the census because I don't want busybodies asking me why i am not religious"?) . At least personally in my circles no one is surprised if you profess to be agnostic, but atheism is still something of a "huh? how can you not believe in some god?" kind of thing.

[madd0ct0r]

Communist nations aren't non-religious.

in this city, there's a catholic cathedral, protestant cathedral, (monastery / nunnery for each), zillions of Buddhist temples and at least one large temple complex, Churches of the Ao Dai, everybody has a shrine for ancestor worship in their house, a shrine for the kitchen gods in the kitchen and most business have another in the workshop.

and yet 70% of people describe themselves as atheist on the official forms.