Before I start, I just want to thank the key people involved in this talk.
This is Aiyana Willard.
She was a graduate student when I was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia.
If I understand correctly, she’s coming here as a postdoc next year.
Stephanie Kramer’s a graduate student of mine at the University of Oregon, and of course
thank you, Cristine, for organizing this.
It’s great so far.
Cristine assigned me this topic [Psychological and social consequences of religious (dis)belief]
to talk about.
I wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted, so I changed it to this [Moral consequences of
religious (dis)belief], which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently
and running a number of analyses on.
Over dinner, I realized that this was a little irrelevant to what we’re talking about today,
and so I woke up at 5 AM and wrote a new talk.
I’m actually going to go with the first talk, but if anybody’s interested in what
the new talk was about, which was about how stereotypes about Christians being unintelligent
and unscientific end up undermining their interest in science and pushing them out of
the field.
That’s another topic I can talk about, either in the question-answer period or you can come
find me afterwards.
Today I’m going to talk about this question [“Does God make you good?], because this
question seems like one people are interested in.
People have been interested in it for a very long time.
Back in the time of Socrates, we know at least back then they were debating this question.
Twenty-five centuries ago, if we fast-forward to the tail-end of the Enlightenment, you
have common arguments being made.
This is Voltaire.
He said, “This sublime system is necessary to man.
It is the sacred tie that binds society, the first foundation of holy equity, the bridle
to the wicked, the hope of the just…if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
him.”
We fast-forward a little further.
This is the late great Christopher Hitchens.
I like Christopher Hitchens a lot, but he’s a little off the mark in this statement.
So he says, “We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least
instills morality.
On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and tat faith
causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”
Now he’s right about this first bit.
We keep hearing about this.
But he’s wrong about everything after that.
There is not conclusive evidence about religion making people mean or selfish.
There are many, many anecdotes that you can pull to make that claim.
But in terms of there being evidence for this, there is evidence, it doesn’t lean in that
direction, it’s not nearly conclusive.
That’s the topic that I’ve undertaken to try to answer, to try to find an answer
to that question—does God make you good?
It’s a nice question, because you have this nice alliteration between “God” and “good”,
and they kind of look like homographs of each other.
It’s also a question that’s fraught with ambiguities.
It really matters what you mean by good, and it matters what you mean by God, and it sort
of matters what you mean by make.
Let’s focus on this one right now.
I think this is possibly the most important.
You do find that if you’re looking at how religiosity affects how people act morally,
there are systematic differences in between what religious and nonreligious people think
is moral.
In particular, one of the recent and popular theories on moral pluralism has been moral
foundations theory, which fractionates our moral concerns into 5 categories.
Harm and care, so issues of compassion, issues about suffering.
Justice and fairness, that’s another concern.
Concerns about authority, respecting people who are in authority.
Loyalty to the group and purity and disgust—another concern for what’s moral and what isn’t.
If you look at how this varies across the religious spectrum, you see that the first
two there’s agreement on.
There’s not much variance in how much religious people versus nonreligious people believe
that this is an important concern.
But on the other 3 is where you see the difference.
It’s the difference you’d expect if you’re familiar with research on political conservatism
and moral foundations.
These results exist after you control for political conservatism, and in many cases
they’re actually stronger than the political conservative differences between conservatives
and liberals.
There is disagreement on what it is to be moral between these groups.
Nonreligious people also—this is work by Jared Piazza—tend to base their morals on
utilitarian consequentialism.
So what are the benefits and costs that happen based on the action that you should or should
not enact.
They’ll be more likely than religious people to agree to a statement like this: Should
you break a promise if it may lead to a greater good or prevent further suffering?
They’ll say yes, if it’s going to create greater good, sure let’s do that.
Religious people are going to be much more deontic with this.
They’re going to feel that they should not break the rule, even if the consequence of
not breaking the rule is greater suffering.
There are these important foundational meta-ethical differences.
But there are areas of agreement.
Those are areas in which we can make direct comparisons.
Things like generosity or not cheating, charity, helping, or volunteerism.
These are all situations that are not pitting 2 different moral foundations, say freedom
vs. equality or justice vs. mercy, against each other.
Instead you’re pitting selfish behavior against non-selfish behavior, or what you
could call prosociality vs. antisocial selfishness.
It’s on this measure, prosociality, this constellation of moral behaviors that we can
actually look at differences across the religious spectrum.
So we conducted a meta-analysis of as many of the studies as we could find that’s been
done on this.
We pulled this all together.
This includes 31 studies, over about 4 decades, with almost 31,000 participants.
We included studies if they had people reporting their religiosity and if they had some measure,
either a self-report measure or a behavioral measure, of that constellation of moral behaviors
that we talked about before—prosociality.
The reason that we split these apart is because there are limits to some of these measures.
So self-report measures, I think most of you guys are going to be familiar with the limitations
of asking people how moral they are.
Here’s an example.
So this is a common self-report measure.
This is the satisfaction of life scale, and if you say that the conditions of my life
are excellent, that you’re satisfied with your life, I will generally take your word
for that.
Imagine if you switched this to the satisfaction with yourself scale, and then you made a claim
that I’m a good mother, I’m not racist, I’m charitable and a moral-abiding person.
Those are situations where maybe I don’t want to take your word as much because you
could be self-inflating.
You could be overemphasizing how good you are compared to how good you actually are.
So, we also included behavioral measures, and we made a distinction between these.
Behavioral measures are measures that social psychologists and experimental economists
have concocted to measure actual behavior in which there’s a direct cost for the participant
to actually demonstrate that they are pro-social in this situation.
One of these examples is they create a spontaneous helping situations.
Someone will drop a bunch of papers accidentally, and they’ll see how many participants in
the study actually pick them up.
Other examples are economic games.
A common one is the Dictator Game.
A lot of you will have heard of this Dictator Game.
Basically it’s very simple.
You take 2 participants into your lab room.
You put them into separate rooms.
They don’t meet each other, they don’t have reputational concern with each other,
and then you give one of them $10.
You give the other one, the receiver, nothing.
Then you say to the dictator, the person who got the $10, you can dictate how much each
of you gets.
The other person got nothing; do you want to split the $10 that you have?
So you could split it 50-50, which would be the equitable thing to do since you were both
randomly put into these roles.
You could be more selfish.
You could only give them $1, or you could do what most people in the game do, which
is to give them nothing and keep the $10 themselves.
So these are examples of behavioral measures.
When we put all these together…let me just orient you to this graph.
This is a forest plot of the 31 studies that I was talking about.
When the squares and the lines go towards that side, that indicates that there’s a
negative association between religiosity and pro-social behaviors.
So religious people in that study ended up being less pro-social than the nonreligious
people.
On the other hand, if it’s passing that line, that means it’s significantly more
pro-social for religious people.
There’s a positive relationship between religiosity and pro-sociality.
So what you can see here is there is small but consistent positive relationship, in terms
of pro-sociality with religious people.
If you were to break it down between these self-report measures, these behavioral measures,
there you see a difference.
There are the self-report measures.
It’s a correlation of about .2, in terms of the self-report measures—questions about
how much do you volunteer, how much do you give to charity.
And if you look at the behavioral measures, they’re actually 0.
There’s no hint of an effect.
There’s actually a substantial difference between what is reported when you’re asked
how pro-social you are and, when you test in the lab, how pro-social religious people
actually demonstrate they are.
So there are a couple reasons that could explain this discrepancy, as far as I can think of.
One, is the one that might immediately be most obvious, that the self-reports aren’t
actually accurate.
You should trust the behavioral measures over the self-reports.
What’s happening here is that religious people are inflating reports of their actual
prosocial behavior.
Everybody tends to inflate these.
The expectation is that maybe religious people are fudging a little bit more than nonreligious
people.
There’s another explanation, which is that the behavioral task should not be tested.
These are not actually reflective of any real differences that might exist outside of the
lab.
There may actually be a pro-social religious advantage that we’re not tapping into with
these artificial tasks that we’re looking at.
I think both of these are true to some degree.
Let’s start with the first one.
There has been a bunch of work showing that religious people do score higher on measures
of social desirable responding.
They tend to indicate that they’re better than they actually are, more than do nonreligious
people.
There have been a couple meta-analyses recently.
This one demonstrated that strongly.
It makes the case that religious people tend to be self-enhancing.
This paper actually makes it really interesting argument.
If you could think of the intuitive explanation, the one that may have occurred to you guys
is something like religion might make people more self-enhance.
Or there could be some sort of personality factor that makes you both religious or self-enhancing.
These guys argue something separate.
They argue something more like this, that it’s actually self-enhancement, the tendency
to enhance yourself, that makes you more religious.
They say that there is something called the self-enhancing personality and that, and I
quote, “people strategically use an ingenious array of means to satisfy the self-enhancement
motive…Religion is a prevalent and important such aspect.
People…will be likely to capitalize on it for satisfying the self-enhancement motive.”
So people who are going to want to aggrandize themselves find a way to do so in religion.
They present a bunch of compelling evidence for that.
I’m convinced about this to some degree.
Another point that needs to be taken into account—this is not incompatible with that—is
if you ask people if they’re religious and if you ask them how pro-social they are, it’s
not that they may only be inflating how much they’re pro-social.
They may also be inflating how much they say they are religious.
We can’t get super accurate, implicit measures of what people actually believe, but we can
see if people inflate their religious attendance compared to how much they actually do attend
religious services.
So this is a recent study.
What they did was they asked people how much they attend, but they asked people in 2 separate
ways.
They randomly assigned people to be actually asked in person; face-to-face to somebody
to whom they’re going to have to respond, or online where you’re not actually talking
to anybody.
The assumption is that people are actually going to be more honest when they’re revealing
this online, but when they’re confronted with a person they’re going to hedge a bit.
That’s what they found.
So when you look at what people say when asked online, you have about 31% saying that they
go weekly or more.
When they’re asked by telephone, that number increases to 36% and the percentage of people
who say they never go actually falls from 43% down to 30%.
So they’re less willing to admit when they’re actually directly talking to somebody “Oh,
I don’t go to church.”
There have been a number of studies like this.
One of my favorites is from the 90s, where they actually just did a head count of everybody
who said they went to church last Sunday and compared that to actually the number of people
who were there.
They did this across the United States.
This is for a few of the cities.
When you actually ask people how many of you went to church last Sunday, these are the
rates you get.
When you actually count how many people showed up, it’s much lower.
In some places, it’s less than half as much.
So people do seem to be inflating their actual religious attendance.
What that means is that when we’re measuring what might be a relationship between religiosity
and prosociality, we might actually be measuring a relationship between your tendency to inflate
how much you go to church and your tendency to inflate how much prosocial behavior you
enact in.
So really what you’re doing is you’re just finding that people who fudge on one
thing fudge on the other.
I guess that’s interesting.
Let’s tackle the other possibility, that our behavioral tasks are not actually telling
us what we want them to be telling us.
Here, I think it’s good to consider the situations in which religious people might
actually in the real world have a prosocial advantage.
It’s not in these cold, sterile lab rooms when that would emerge.
It’s when they’re actually enmeshed in the community, or thinking about their religious
beliefs, that are actually getting them to engage in prosocial behavior.
So it doesn’t look so much like this, a cold, sterile lab room, but more like this.
When you’re reminded of religion, when you’re thinking of religion, that’s the situation
religious people might actually be more prosocial.
There have been a number of studies that have recently tried to create that religious situation
by reminding people in the moment of their religiosity, arousing those thoughts and seeing
how that affects their prosocial behavior.
It’s used a number of priming techniques.
They will in various ways—explicit, obvious, and implicit—arouse thinking of religiosity
in the lab, in the moment.
Field studies have done this with environmental prime.
So they’ll do experiments outside of churches to see how that affects people compared to
outside of other buildings.
I’ll just give you 1 example of this.
This is an early study that we ran.
This used an implicit priming technique with scrambled sentences.
For those of you guys who don’t know how this implicit priming technique works, basically
you get a bunch of sentences or word scrambles like this.
You cross out 1 word, and then you rearrange the remaining 4 words to make a sensical sentence.
You change that to “he tied his shoes”.
That’s something you would see in the control condition.
In the condition we’re actually trying to arouse thoughts of religion, you embed keywords
in some of the sentences.
So here, you can try this if you want, what would it be?
You drop “eradicate” and you can make “she felt the spirit”.
In one of the studies, we’ll talk about this later, in one of the conditions rather,
we included a third condition where we actually instead of priming god, we primed secular
institutions of justice.
So they went to court.
Then we had them play the Dictator Game, the anonymous Dictator Game that I mentioned before.
These are the results.
This is just comparing in the control condition, non-theists compared to theists.
You see there is a bit of a directional difference, but there’s no significant difference between
these 2, which is consistent with what we found in the meta-analysis.
This is a behavioral task.
You don’t see a difference based on religiosity.
But our question is what happens when you put them in the priming situation.
Here’s what they found in the first study.
When people are just in the control condition, no religion is aroused, out of $10 people
share on average just under $2 with the other person.
So they’re pretty selfish.
When you prime religion, that shoots up almost to that $5 level of equity.
In the other condition—this was with community members who tend to be a little more generous
in control conditions than students—it was still pretty low, and you still saw the same
increase.
So in this case you see that religious priming does increase generosity.
Now you say, well this is an artificial task itself in the lab.
This is not how people come across religion in their real lives.
I think that we’re actually primed all the time with religion.
This is the view out the window of my apartment in Eugene, Oregon.
That’s a church with some hieroglyphics on it.
That’s what I stare at every day when I look out the window.
A couple of years ago, I was teaching at Abu Dhabi, and this was the view outside of my
window there.
There’s one mosque, but you can also see another mosque over there and another mosque
over there.
So there were 3 mosques that were directly outside of my window.
For any of you who have spent any time in Muslim-majority countries, you’ll know that
the most beautiful and hard-to-ignore reminder of religion is the call to prayer, which goes
off 5 times a day and blared across the entire city.
A number of researchers have actually used that call to prayer as a naturally occurring
religious prime and found consistent results with what we saw.
Mark Aveyard, who’s in the UAE, showed that when the call to prayer was playing in the
background, people were less likely to cheat on this task that may be tempting to cheat
on.
Eric Duhaime has this unpublished study where he actually went to Morocco, to Marrakech,
and had people play a Dictator Game-type task with shopkeepers there.
He then measured when the call to prayers were going on in the background and when it
wasn’t.
What he found was that when it wasn’t happening, the shopkeepers were reasonably likely—about
60% of the time—they engaged in the fully selfless option in the Dictator Game.
They gave all the money to the charitable recipient.
When the call to prayer was going, this went up to 100%.
Every single one of the shopkeepers, when that was happening, gave all the money away.
So it had this profound prosocial effect.
In America, a couple of economists have actually looked at a naturally occurring prime in just
the day of Sunday.
Just it being Sunday to a lot of people activates religious thinking.
What they found was that when you have a website which is prompting people to give to charity,
on Sundays, you have religious people giving a lot more than nonreligious people.
But on every day except Sunday, there is no difference.
And so that’s actually, again, that’s consistent with what we saw before, right?
So when there’s no prime, when you’re just in a control condition, there’s no
difference between religious people and nonreligious people, only when religion is activated do
you see this difference.
We ran another meta-analysis where we took 25 of these priming studies.
They had to be assigned to either a control condition or a priming condition, and there
had to be again either a behavioral or self-report measure of prosociality.
All but 2 of these were behavioral measures.
So there were 25 studies, just under 5,000 participants.
What you find is that there is this significant effect where priming people with religion
increases their prosocial behavior.
Now, a subset of these studies, 11 of them, actually broke
people down between religious people and nonreligious or less religious people.
And so you can actually look at the difference in how these primes affect them.
What you find is that the primes do affect religious people, but they have no effect
on nonreligious people, which is kind of what you expect.
There’s this interaction between the religious personality, or the religious disposition,
and the religious situation.
This is actually in that study that I mentioned before; it’s what we found there as well.
So if you just look at in the control condition between our theistic and our non-theistic
subjects, in the control condition they again didn’t differ.
When there was the religious prime, you do see that it affects the religious people,
but it does not affect the non-theists in this situation.
But you recall that I mentioned that there was this prime of secular institutions, and
you see what happens there is that it actually increases how much people give in both cases.
And so that’s a particularly effective way of stimulating prosocial behavior.
Some of you are probably thinking that this may explain a question you have in the back
of your head, which is that hold on, some of the least religious places in the world
are some of the most cooperative and prosperous places.
I think this gives an explanation as to why.
There are these different institutions that, when they emerge, they can regulate cooperation,
they can encourage people to act prosocially and not cheat, so that religion no longer
has to.
In a way, these take the place of those religious institutions that were previously responsible
for encouraging prosociality.
I think that’s why if you—this is what you could call a secular alternative for what
was previously done—I think why you see that one of the strongest negative predictors
of religiosity across countries is the presence and trust in these reliable secular institutions
in the rule of law.
So you see it’s a very very actually stark relationship there where, the higher the trust
in the rule of law, the less religious you are.
So let’s recap then.
Does god make you good?
Let’s go back to the original question.
Well yes, you have to admit that it really does, at least temporarily.
It acts in the same way that food acts with satiety.
You eat, but then you get hungry again.
It has to be constantly refreshed so as you keep remembering to be pro-social.
But do you need god to be good?
The answer here is clearly that no, that’s not the case, so long as you have something
else.
There are other routes to pro-social behavior.
That’s all I want to say.