Welcome to Reasonable Doubts,
your skeptical guide to religion.
(Music)
You're listening to Reasonable Doubts, the radio show and podcast for those who
won't just take things on faith.
I'm Jamie Beahan and for this special episode
of Reasonable Doubts, we're featuring a lecture I gave in February
to the Grand Traverse humanists in Traverse City, Michigan.
The lecture was entitled; “Does religion make us better?",
a critical review of the religious pro-sociality hypothesis.
Longtime listeners will no doubt recognize many of the studies
talked about in this lecture.
A previous RD-extra and our episode “The Skeptics Toolkit to Psychology of Religion”
discussed these findings.
But this lecture is a bit different, mostly in the trivial
and, I'm sure, disappointing fact that I am presenting the findings rather than
our resident doctor professor Luke Galen.
But I think this lecture has some merit in that it finally collects a wide range
of studies, discussed over several years on the show, into one convenient place
hopefully making it easier for fans of the show to review the information
or share with a friend and please do share. This is important research and I
know doctor Galen would agree with me in thinking that it hasn't gotten as
much attention as it deserves. So you'd be doing us
and the cause of skepticism a great favor by sharing this lecture
on whatever blogs or social media you frequent and never underestimate
the power of good old word-of-mouth sharing either.
And please visit doubtcast.org to share any comments or questions or feedback
you may have about the episode.
So be sure to tune in next week for the Doubtcasters review
of the New Christian propaganda film “God's not dead”.
Should be a good one. Until then, take care and keep doubting.
(Music)
(Applause)
Thank you for coming and thank you for the privilege of
allowing me to speak to your group. My name is Jeremy Beahan.
I teach World Religions and Introduction to Philosophy along with a handful of
other subjects at Kendall College of Art and Design.
I'm also the producer and cohost
of the Reasonable Doubt Podcast which
at its peak was the top atheist podcast on iTunes for several years,
won the People's Choice podcasting award
for best religious inspirational podcast which was - (Laughing) - different.
People look at me funny when I mention that.
I'm speaking tonight on the issue of “Does religion make people better?”
and we're approaching this not so much from a philosophical
perspective, as you usually hear this question grapple with,
but we're approaching this from an empirical standpoint.
What can science actually tell us
about how religion affects morality. The subtitle here's a skeptical review
of the religious pro-sociality hypothesis.
So, that might take some explanation.
You might guess from that subtitle that this is going to be a bit have been
informationally dense talk tonight.
But I don't have to tell you that in our culture
there's an overwhelming assumption among the general public
that being religious is necessary to be a happy and ethical person.
We have plenty of preachers and pundits and ordinary people
reminding us daily that without God society will quickly de-evolve
into wickedness and anarchy. What you may not be familiar with
as much however is the growing body of social psychology research
that at first glance actually seems to support this notion.
The more technical term for the hypothesis that religion makes us good
is known as the religious pro-sociality hypothesis.
My task tonight is to present you with an overview of this research
and to acquit you with the tools necessary to think critically about it.
Because as we're about to see the religious pro-sociality hypothesis
really does indeed have some support.
But when we look at the evidence more closely, we're going to
discover little devils within the details.
But first I have to give you a quick disclaimer:
I don't get any credit or blame
for what I'm about to say this evening. This is not my research
that I'm reporting on, this is actually doctor Luke Galen's research.
He is a professor of psychology of religion
at Grand Valley State University and
almost all what I'm going to be drawing from tonight comes from his paper
in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association
called: “Does religious belief promote pro-sociality, a critical examination”.
How did I get involved in this topic?
He put me in charge of
writing up a summary of his research,
kind of distilling pages upon pages and pages of review
into something coherent that the average consumer
could actually understand. So that was my task writing up
his review and free inquiry, since Luke Galen
doesn't like their leave the house too often or interact
with ordinary human beings. (Laughing)
He kind of appointed me to be his spokesman.
He jokingly refers to me as Galen's Bulldog.
I guess I'm Thomas Henry Huxley to his Darwin.
So I've been glad to have the opportunity to do interviews
and talk to groups like this about this research because I think it
needs to get out there.
All right, before we go any further
let us define what we mean by pro-sociality.
I hate that word already. I am barely into this lecture
and tired of saying it,
but the term pro-social refers to any kind of positive social behavior
and this runs the gamut from generosity in the form a charitable giving
or time spent volunteering to personal qualities perhaps
such as positive personality traits:
being helpful, being honest and there's actually an impressive array of
scientific studies that support this hypothesis, that try to show
that the religious exhibit greater pro-sociality than the non-religious.
In effect this has even become the subject of a number a popular books.
One you may have heard of
is “A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists” by David Myers
or more recently “American Grace, How Religion Divides and Unites Us”.
So the general public is being told that the data are in
and religion makes you happy, happier, healthier and more helpful.
That this is a conclusion that is not just philosophy or religion. It's science.
In fact even some atheists are getting in on this.
A seemingly overwhelming case for the pro-social effects
of religion has been enough to convince people here like Jessie Bering,
an atheist psychologist and actually a pretty good author.
Enough to convince him that religion is beneficial, at least for others.
In a recent Slate article entitled *“Don't trust the godless”(,
Jesse Bering confessed; "Even as an atheist, I have more confidence
in religious people and now science is backing me up.”
A fuller quote is up here; "This is a difficult confession to make
because on the surface I'm sure it sounds wildly, wildly hypocritical.
Still here it goes; "I trust religious people more than I trust atheists."
Trustworthiness is a different thing altogether from intellect
and I suppose I'm the ever so social pragmatist
in my dealings with other people."
So pretty serious claim, if you get even atheist psychologists
saying; "Don't trust the godless".
Before we go any further though
we're going to have to look at what are the kind of methods
that are used in pro-sociality research.
We're going to see a variety of different
experimental setups and methods for conducting this kind of research.
This would include self-reports, what people say about themselves and
third-party ratings of individuals, laboratory tests of behavior,
lab studies of economic games – we’ll talk about those more later -
priming studies, where people are presented
with the religious concept subconsciously
- usually where they will not realize they've been primed by the concept
and then we'll see what happens - and also spirituality scales.
Scales are meant to design, to detect the level of one's spirituality
and then we compare their behaviors on that.
What I'm going to try to highlight
is some other pitfalls that researchers face
in each of these types of research methods.
Let's start with the top report data;
"Will being religious make you a better person?"
Well, the fateful certainly seem to think so.
When asked to give an assessment of their own character and values,
religious individuals tend to report being...
having a more grateful disposition; they rate themselves as more helpful;
they claim to value forgiveness more highly than the non-religious;
And many studies actually take these self-reports at face value.
The fact that believers think they're more moral
is actually taken as evidence that they do exhibit
these pro-social traits. Big question is: "Should we take believers at their word?
No. Not if their evaluations are based on a self-serving bias
rather than a realistic assessment of their own character.
Self-report data tend to be unreliable by its very nature.
People are prone to forming positive illusions about themselves. We all do it.
We tend to inflate our responses on questionnaires as a result
to make ourselves look better.
Sometimes this is just concern over our own personal self-image.
Social psychologists call this self-enhancement.
Or sometimes we want to make a good impression with others
or good impression for our group in particular.
This is sometimes referred to as impression management.
While this is a widespread tendency
and it's by no means restricted just to the religious.
What's interesting is, this tendency might be more pronounced
in those who have a strong level of religious belief.
Highly religious people tend to view themselves as better than others, generally.
Even better than other religious individuals.
And they also evaluate themselves more highly than non-religious individuals
on attributes that have absolutely nothing to do with religion.
So for example they might score themselves higher
on measures of intelligence or being a good worker.
Things that do not seem immediately related to their religious morality.
Those high in intrinsic religiosity actually have been shown to have
a higher degree of self-enhancement and impression management.
Just one example: if you prime a Christian with self-esteem primes,
you'll see them actually rating themselves as living up to Christian principles
more often than their fellow believers. If however you do the reverse
and you offer up an assessment that questions their high self-esteem
or make them write about something that they don't like about themselves,
those who are high in intrinsic religiosity
- that means the level of belief - they are more likely
to resort to self-deception as a compensating strategy.
Also highly religious people are particularly
concerned with presenting themselves as moral persons
and particularly threatened when that self-image is challenged.
So, I guess the big question is; "Why do researchers even rely
on these self-reports some of the time?" Well, because at least in some cases
these positive self-assessments are actually corroborated by others:
their family, their colleagues, their peers.
So, third-party evaluators rate religious individuals
as being nicer, more cooperative and highly altruistic
and empathetic as well. To some this is proof
that the self-reports are not self-delusion, they're not moral hypocrisy.
They are correct assessments of their character.
But I think we can still be a little skeptical here.
When we're talking about a predominantly religious society,
where about 80 to 95% of people are religious
and around 75% are at least nominally Christian,
it's a good bet that a significant proportion of those subjects, families
and peers are also religious,
meaning there's a possibility of in-group bias at work here.
And actually there is some evidence to support that.
In-group favoritism is a well-studied phenomenon in social psychology.
Again, this is not just religious people here, this is all of us.
It is natural for individuals to derive self-esteem from the groups
they’re associated with.
It's natural to provide a positive image to the public
for those who share their identity. So, consistent with the predictions
of social identity theory,
we see believers tend to show more favoritism towards other individuals
and speak more poorly of non-religious
and this even includes those from different religious groups.
Often the favoritism - and here's the key point here -
often the favoritism is extended to other religious individuals,
regardless of whether or not they behaved well or poorly,
are still be reviewed more favorably,
even when they've been up to no good. I'll give you an example here
of when sometimes believers will rate religious individuals more highly
than non-religious individuals, even when they exhibit the exact same behaviors.
I was a part of this study which was published in 2011.
I was a participant and so in front of a camera I wore two different T-shirts,
I wore three actually: just a plain white T-shirt
then in the other condition I wore a Jesus fish T-shirt
and then third condition I wore a Darwin fish T-shirt.
And then I read the exact same script each time
which was I was presenting myself as a college student
who was using my spring break to help in disaster relief organization
and talking about my positive experiences.
No mention of religion or anything else. What we found in this study
was that people rated me as more likable,
more intelligent, more trustworthy and more kind,
and more moral overall
when I was wearing the Jesus fish. So exact same behaviors but a subtle cue
that I might be religious makes people evaluate my behavior better.
Most studies that rely on peer-rated ratings do not adequately control
for this tendency for in-group bias and that's the problem.
Ideally researchers would ensure that participants are completely unaware
of the religious identity of those they're rating.
Then we have more reason to trust their evaluations as accurate,
but this sadly is rarely the case. However in studies
that do, and most studies where the raters
are actually aware of their targets religious identities
a clear bias emerges and that suggests
an in-group bias when the people know they're religious,
they rate them more positively. There is an interesting twist to all of this:
non-religious individuals do not appear to rate their fellow non-believers
as any more pro-social than they do the religious. For some reason this
in-group bias doesn't seem to be affecting the non-religious to the same degree.
Now should the fact that non-religious people also rate
the religious highly, indicate that these judgments are based on a clear
added assessment of their character? Are atheists really going to have
a pro-religious bias? Actually it's quite possible that they would
if their judgments have been swayed by a strong religious,
pro-religious cultural stereotype.
And again, there is evidence to suggest that's the case.
Here's more evidence for a pro-religious stereotype,
that we can find by looking at similar studies that are conducted
in different cultures than our own.
For example some report that happiness, life satisfaction
and personality measures like agreeableness
are more closely associated with religion in the United States
than in the United Kingdom or Northern Europe where religion is less dominant.
To give you one specific example: this particular study here
asks people to rate their impressions of people just from looking at photographs
of faces and smiling faces were judged
to be more religious than non smiling faces.
That was in the United States. In the United Kingdom
the exact opposite was true and
tends to be a general relationship
between religion and self-control, mental well-being,
psychological adjustment, social support.
In general in societies where the non-religious are the majority
the non-religious are rated more favorably
on all those particular measures. So, again evidence that there
is a cultural bias at work here.
I think by now it should be clear that self-report data doesn't provide
reliable evidence for the religious pro-social reality hypothesis.
Self-evaluations on religious subjects are vulnerable to self-enhancement,
impression management, distortions and others and they are contaminated
quite possibly by a widely-held pro-religious cultural stereotype.
It might be better instead of trusting self-reports
to look at experimentally controlled measures of behavior
or, if you prefer the way Jesus might say it, we should judge believers
by their fruit not by their words. Let's look at
what their actual deeds tell us. Well, for one religious individuals
claim to value forgiveness more than others
but actually any effect of their religiosity on actual forgiveness
has been found to be negligible. This is just one study
that shows that the comparison of self-reports with controlled experiments
on behavior reveal how often believers
fail to live up to their high opinion of themselves.
Those in high in intrinsic religiosity again - this is a measure of belief -
reported a more grateful disposition but don't do not perform
better than anyone else in studies
measuring reciprocal behavioral gratitude: "Will they give back?"
High intrinsic religiosity doesn't seem to reduce aggression
here is the scary detail: it tends to make people think
they're less aggressive than they really are.
Fundamentalists in particular report
higher levels of altruism towards everybody
but in reality they are more willing to help friends
or like-minded individuals. They're not as likely to help strangers
or what is sometimes called 'value violators',
perhaps like a homosexual or something like that,
that is clearly on the wrong side of the divide on some culture war issue.
We have to remember again that everyone tends
to overestimate how moral they actually are.
So, this is really common to find a gap between how individuals predict
they'll behave and how they actually behave.
If we were to take everybody in this room we would probably
see the exact same phenomena.
We are no different. It's just that the fact
seems to be more pronounced in religious populations.
As we said before, highly religious do show a greater tendency
towards self-enhancement on questionnaires and this disjunction
between self-reported measured behavior
is actually wider in the religious than in the rest of the population.
In fact the greatest gap we can see
between altruistic beliefs and altruistic behaviors
is actually found in those who rate religion
as more important to them personally.
What's funny is that sometimes the experimental evidence
is so contrary to our stereotypes about religion
that some researchers put a spin on this conclusion.
What they're publishing is showing no positive effect for religion
but their abstracts or the way they interpret the data
speaks in glowing terms. For example this particular study here.
McCullough & Worthington in 1999 said that
"Even if religious people are no more facile
at forgiving in real life situations than are less religious people,
they do you desire to be forgiving and go on about how great it is that they
want to be good forgiving people."
I'd like to argue to you that praising the leaders for their moral intentions
kind of misses the point.
It's not that we just desire to be better - and that's good -
in some cases they already think they're superior.
And there are major dangers in having an unrealistic assessment
of one's own character and limits
Let's move on to a different type of study:
religious priming studies. Although religious individuals do not seem
to behave as morally as they report,
it would still be very odd. I personally would find it strange
if religion didn't have some impact on moral behavior.
After all, scriptures and sermons abound with exhortations to love thy neighbor,
to do unto others as you would have them do onto you
and I think frequent exposure to these messages
would result in pro-social behaviors.
So priming studies are a useful way of seeving this out.
Again participants are primed somehow. Maybe they have to unscramble
a word bank and it has religious words in it.
Or perhaps they have to read
a portion of Scripture and write a response to it.
Sometimes it can be really subtle: symbols in the room,
a crucifix in the room,
jewelry or clothing. Sometimes it's just the context.
Conducting the experiment in a church instead of,
say, a high school gymnasium or something like that.
Well the good news of priming studies is that this is the best evidence
we can find for the religious pro-sociality hypothesis.
There's a lot of data supporting it.
There are good studies
showing greater honesty and generosity
amongst the religious, increased sharing,
increased cooperation, better self-control in distressing situations
and greater resistance to temptation.
So why are religious concepts so good at priming these kinds of behavior?
Several studies cited a possible mechanism here.
'Supernatural surveillance' they called it.
The belief that one's actions are constantly and inescapably
being observed by a divine being.
Thinking that this is a strong reminder to us
to be aware of our actions and perhaps that's why
religious concepts prime these pro-social behaviors.
God might be watching after all.
But I wont to share some curious details
that aren't as often shared in these priming studies.
Neutral religious works like Bible, the Cycle ????
or Chapel don't seem to promote any helping behavior.
It seems to be only positive words like heaven, miracle or bless
that have that effect on people. Even more interesting
the positive effects don't seem to be dependent
on the participants level of religiosity. You can be just kind of religious
or you could be a hardcore fundamentalist
and the priming affects you the same way.
Also, non-religious people respond positively to religious primes
and to the exact same degree as their religious counterparts.
If you were to look at all those symbols, you would act more morally too.
Even more interesting: priming secular concepts, like civil
or court, seem to have the same power to promote
honesty or lower hypocrisy as religious primes do.
And religious destructive atheists:
the distrust they have for us goes down
when the religious are primed with concepts of secular authority.
That's really interesting. Why would that possibly be?
Well, one idea, not exactly sure, but one idea is that the leaders know
that atheists do not live their lives as if God is watching them.
So without the supernatural monitoring they may wonder
what reason we have for behaving well.
But this distrust can be ameliorated when we are reminded
that morality can be monitored in different ways.
So these kind of pacific primes remind everybody;
"Oh wait, there is a social order, there is something keeping these
evil atheists in check." And so their negative impressions go down.
Amazingly even the presence of a mirror
or just pictures of eyes in the laboratory will actually have these same effects
which actually really boost that notion of supernatural surveillance.
Obviously this has implications for the religious pro-sociality hypothesis.
Religious concepts do not seem
to prime pro-social behavior like honesty because they're religious.
It may be that any concepts that are associated with morality in a particular
culture trigger greater concern for protecting your reputation.
Again since there's a widespread cultural stereotype
that religion is linked to morality here,
religious concepts will activate moral behavior, but as we pointed out
secular primes do just as well.
While the positive effects of religious priming
are the stuff of headlines, what you don't usually hear about is the dark side
of religious primes.
Numerous studies demonstrate
that socially undesirable behaviors
also manifest when subjects are exposed to religious messages.
So for example, participants who read passages from the Bible
depicting God sanctioned violence, administer more electrical shocks
than the control group in studies of aggression.
We should note this works on non-believers as well.
Even a non-believer reading those passages from the Bible
will also become more vicious in their behaviors toward somebody.
It's just that the effect seems to be more pronounced for believers.
Especially disturbing is this subgroup
of religious believers high in intrinsic religiosity
and also high in levels of submissiveness.
This group was very disturbing because they became the most vengeful
after being primed with religious words. They really seemed to go off the rails.
So I guess what I'm saying is: it doesn't affect all people equally.
Certain personality characteristics come into play here too
to either aggravate or kind of mute these responses.
I'd like to share this study real quick. Experiments where people were assigned
to read the biblical version of the golden rule
actually had no effect on diminishing Christians’ homophobia.
So, negative attitudes towards homosexuals
were not at all diminished
by reading what we think is a very positive prime,
right, the golden rule. Strangely enough reading the Buddhist version
of the golden rule actually increased their homophobic responses.
If they read another religious text telling them to be merciful
and do onto others as you would have them to do want to them,
they wanted to do that even less. This is perhaps
because the moral imperative
was coming from this distrusted out-group source.
Likewise unscrambling words associated with Christianity increased
racial prejudice towards african-americans
that was found by Johnson, lead author Johnson in 2010.
And attitudes toward all out-group members became more negative
when experiments were conducted in a church setting rather than
than in a civic context.
This is a strange paradox we're looking at here.
Religious priming seems to increase
both pro-social behaviors like honesty and sharing, and non pro-social behaviors
like aggression and prejudice. This will make more sense I think to us when we
consider another curious,
but consistent finding in this literature
that the kindness of religious individuals is typically not
extended universally to everyone.
Instead the primary beneficiaries of a religious pro-sociality
are usually other believers. This can be most clearly seen in economic games.
So, to save a little bit of time I'm not going to go into how all of
these games work, but they basically start with people trading or exchanging money.
Those games are designed to encourage cooperation and trust.
So basically if the players work together,
they will both get further along, but one player
might have the opportunity to make off with more money if they deceive or lie
or cheat the other players. So this is all trying
to assess cooperation, trust,
giving, that sort of thing. The economic games shown
in behavioral economic studies where the religiosity of the participants is none.
- so we actually know what they are - a general trend emerges:
religious individuals cooperate more and give more money
than non-religious participants. So they do that overall.
They give more and they trust more than the non-religious.
The pro-sociality hypothesis is true.
It's just has that twist: they only give it to those
who share their religious identity.
For example this study, Ahmed, 2009 found the clergy students
exchanged greater money offers than non clergy students,
but only to those from their own religious group.
These findings are almost, well, they are most likely due
to that previous phenomenon we mentioned of in-group favoritism.
But there also might be something else going on here. This might be that
pro-religious cultural stereotype
happening again, because notice: non-religious participants
did not show the same in-group favoritism
in those economic games. They also trusted
religious participants more than their non-religious peers
and allocated more money to them overall, even though that money
would not be reciprocated.
Yeah, it's amazing how ingrained that stereotype is.
This pattern of preferential treatment
is not limited to behavioral economic studies.
It constitutes a general trend across the entire literature.
In fact a new word had to be coined just to explain it.
One researcher who is very popular in this by the name of Saroglou
coined the term "minimal prosociality",
meaning the greater helping on the part of the religious that extended to friends
an in-group members but not too out-group members
who threatened religious values.
So, I guess the correct way to say it or was consistent with most of the evidence
in these economic games
are that religious people are ‘minimally pro-social’.
And actually if we take this idea of limited pro-sociality seriously
it explains a lot of other trends that we see in the data.
For example across different cultures we see that religiosity
is weakly but still positively correlated with the value of benevolence,
charity, helping people out and yet at the same time is negatively
related with the value of universalism,
helping out, you know, your neighbor, your stranger,
the Good Samaritan, that type of thing. Again it seems like a contradiction,
but when you take the idea of limited
or minimal pro-sociality seriously,
it tends to make more sense. It's that in-group favoritism again.
Also it might explain things like why religious primes
increase ethnic prejudice
and derogation of out-group members,
because religious concepts activated in-group bias in people's minds.
This also plays through religious research on giving.
This one conclusion I'm not as sure about,
but it is very clear that religious organizations themselves
are the largest source of charitable giving. Religious people give way more to charity
than the non-religious and that finding has held up across the board.
But as other studies note, many of the recipients of these,
even ones that are labeled secular,
tend to be religious or some religious organization.
So all this money is exchanging hands within the in-group.
This would be really interesting one to test
if we can tease out that in-group favoritism
would we still see a charity gap between the non-religious
and the religious? We might, actually I suspect, we probably would
and for this reason there's another aspect
to religious charitable giving, and that is generosity
measured as a function of religious importance
was smaller than those measured as a variation in religious attendance.
That is church attendance seems to be the key factor
in how much a religious person will give.
If you actually measure religiosity by belief,
how much conviction do you have that God exists
we'll see that that predicts giving to a lesser degree
then church attendance. I think what's going on here is
when you're actually in the building, you're given an opportunity
to give, right? The plate is passed around
and there's social pressure for you to put something in that plate.
I still think the religious should get credit for this, but they get credit for
building institutions that support charitable giving.
It may not be the belief, the religious belief,
that's really motivating this behavior.
So I guess that kind of brings up an interesting question here.
How actually are we measuring religiosity
because, as we just saw, depending on how we measured it,
we might get different effects.
Typically the methodology that's employed here is to compare
a general population of people to highly religious people
and weekly religious people. And then the atheists agnostics
or all the nones, we call them, those who declare no religious affiliation,
are mixed into that sample as well.
There are different ways again of measuring
intrinsically religiosity as I mentioned is a measure
of metaphysical belief or commitment.
Extrinsic religiosity, as I call it, is often a measure of behavior,
how often do you pray, engage in rituals.
That sometimes includes another way that is measured
is measuring religiosity purely through church attendance alone.
So whenever you see a study that says religious people are better
at XYZ, the next question you should ask is;
"Better compared to whom?" And the reason is:
how one measures religiosity has a major impact on your findings.
For example, frequent church attendance has been linked
to modestly lower rates of mental illness such as depression,
but the effect is negligible when you measure
religiosity as strength of belief.
Again, people have better mental health because they're
in a congregation of people, they have a support social support network,
like-minded people to talk to. The belief doesn't seem to be as important.
Studies that control for purely social factors
find a greatly diminished or non-existent effect
of religious beliefs on pro-social measures.
So you can see how we measure religion
and who we compare our groups to is very important in this debate.
Most frequently the strongest pro-social effects
are associated with church attendance
and social contacts rather than just metaphysical belief.
So it appears that group affiliation drives many of these behaviors.
Could a committed secular group - like this one right here -
have effect on its membership similar to that of a church?
In this book that I mentioned earlier - unfortunately it's buried on page 472 -
you have to get through all the good stuff
to finally see this qualification,
but Robert Putnam mentions "even an atheist
who happens to become involved in the social life
of a congregation is much more likely to volunteer at a soup kitchen
then the most fervent believer who prays alone."
And then it goes on to say - or slightly before that on page 465 -
he says: "Religious belief turns out to be utterly irrelevant to explaining the religious
as in good neighbourliness." That should've been on page 1.
But both reviewers in that book didn't get that far.
You can guess how it was depicted in the popular press.
In fact that's a major problem. The problem with most studies is
that they are lumping all nonbelievers together, without considering how
confident they are in their non-belief,
whether or not they attend groups like you do right here,
how involved they are with the community overall.
They're just all dumped into one pool: the non-religious.
And then they're compared with weekly religious and highly religious,
typically highly religious people who are in a church context.
When you do that, you do get what's called a linear effect.
If pro-social, being happy, healthy and more helpful is all on this axis,
and religiosity on this one, we would see as religiosity rises
the more religious you get, the more happy, helpful
and honest you are as an individual.
But what we're kind of doing is we're cutting off half of our sample.
The few studies that compare highly religious people
with the confidently non-religious actually show
what's called a curvilinear effect
between religiosity and pro-sociality.
To explain what's going on with this curvilinear effect,
- I should have had noticed, but I didn't -
Essentially what we do, what we've done is we've expanded our sample.
So before the atheists and agnostics and humanists were getting lost in this side of
the curve now we brought it out
and we actually see that it's the less confident, the weekly religious,
the weekly secular in the middle
that tend to have poor ratings on pro-social measures.
Oh, here's what I was looking for. Nominal believers,
not atheists, show the highest levels of depression actually,
the poorest mental health
and they generally report less satisfaction with life.
And fact is, this is true of the cross-cultural data on this too.
The world value survey found that both those who claim religion is very important
and those who claim that it wasn't important at all,
tended to be the happiest.
So curvilinear effects are also found in the moral realm,
for example physicians, Doctors Without Borders and that sort of thing
highest membership is going to be highly religious and totally atheist.
This is true when
Milgrams famous obedience trials - if you're familiar with those studies -
where we get to see just how much will somebody
obey the experimenter. When those were replicated,
it was the extreme believers and the extreme non-believers
that were most likely to disobey the researchers unethical orders.
So actually being highly religious or highly non-religious
seems to give you a little bit more moral integrity.
Part of the hypothesis why this might be is because
these pools of individuals, they're so certain of their world view
that they're not as kicked around by the pressure of social conformity as others.
So it appears that confidence in one's worldview
and regular affiliation with like minded people
are far more important to well-being and moral integrity
than your particular beliefs about metaphysics. Sorry guys,
even some non-believers are sad to hear that sometimes, they want to believe that
believing the right thing, having the right grasp on reality
will make you a better person
and it doesn't seem that metaphysical beliefs are all that important.
But sadly studies are not designed to notice curvilinear effects a lot of times
And when they aren't, they can give the impression that atheists are in danger
of poor physical or mental health
and this is exactly what we see with the military's spiritual fitness scale, that they have.
I don't know if anybody has ever heard of that?
The US military has a spiritual fitness dimension in their instrument
that they use to assess a soldier's wellness and mental health.
And they conclude that soldiers have the greatest resiliency
when they are spiritual, when they are religious
and this has prompted some superior officers
to go find their underlings who are non-religious
and to pressure them into prayer meetings and other religious services, right,
because it's bad for their health. They might be in a suicide risk.
However though an examination of the actual question items on the spirituality scale
shows a major flaw in the way these concepts are measured.
And it's going to be my last major point about how this research is conducted.
"Criterion contamination"
this is where the pro-sociality literature
defines spirituality in a way that kind of begs the question.
So for example, usually when we make a prediction
of some sort of criterion, you want the items used in the prediction
to not contain elements of what is being predicted.
If you flip the conclusion and you put it in your premise,
you're arguing in a circle, right?
But yet we see this happen all the time,
we see the reverse happening all the time.
For example this right here. Religiously engaged individuals
have greater social networks, but religious engagement
was defined by having church social contacts.
So really all this is saying - I mean it sounds really good, right? -
Doesn't it? Wow? Religious engagement really benefits us.
All this is saying, is; "Socially engaged religious people
are socially engaged religious people."
That is all that is said . Many spirituality scales measure concepts
that do not necessarily refer to supernatural believes either.
For example, these are all the things that will get you a high rating as a
spiritual person on these fitness scales.
"I believe there is a larger meaning to life.
It's important for me to give something back to my community."
If you answer yes to that, you're labeled as religious on this scale.
"I believe that humanity as a whole is basically good."
If you have a positive humanistic outlook,
you might say you're going to score on that spirituality scale too.
"I'm concerned about those who will come after me in life."
So numerous studies including this military spiritual fitness assessment
claims to demonstrate that religiosity is related to pro-social outcomes,
but they are really just criterion contamination effects.
Having pro-social traits here
is what defines being religious.
Just begging the question. And as we know many atheists
with a broader sense of meaning would score ‘spiritual’ on these same scales.
This artificially inflates the apparent relationship between religiosity
or spirituality and these positive pro-social outcomes.
All right. So, tying it all together.
The question; “Does religion make us better?” actually doesn't admit
of a simple answer. You've already seen evidence showing: "yes and no"
or "yes in particular ways and no and other particular ways".
Unfortunately this stuff just doesn't work in a sound bite
and we live in a sound-bite culture.
The conclusion one reaches depends
on the measure of religiosity being used; the way pro-sociality is defined.
We have to be cognizant of a host of
complicating factors if we're going to be accurate.
Really this is like a minefield for a critical thinker.
Even the most experienced critical thinker is going to run into problems
with how complex this data is.
So we came up with 10 questions for thinking critically about religious pro-sociality
that will help people in the future to think more carefully about these studies.
Number 1: has the research controlled for the possibility that stereotypes
- such as the expectation that religious individuals will be more pro-social -
have those stereotypes affected self-reports and ratings?
2: Are the results based on evidence that have been compromised
by in-group favoritism or bias?
3: When pro-social effects follow the priming of religious concepts,
will those same effects follow secular prime?
That's a great one for the priming study.
Number 4: is the study also able to detect potential negative
as well as positive effects for religious primes?
5: Is the research based on self-reports or does it also measures actual behaviors?
If it doesn't measure actual behaviors, it's worthless.
6: could the context of this study have an impact on the results? For example,
would this study get the same results in the United States as opposed to
other nations in Northern Europe that are predominately non-religious?
7: are the results solely attributable to religious belief itself
or is there a group affiliation effect going on?
If church attending believers are compared to non church attenders,
the sources of any differences might be unclear.
Number 8: does the study conflate non-believe with low religiosity
or do we have a clear measure of the non-believers?
By the way, for we gonna fulfill number 8 we need more research on secularists.
So we need more researchers willing to study communities like this
and answer surveys and that sort of things.
If you ever see those things pop up in your inbox.
Please take'm. You will help us all.
Number 9: do the religious groups under comparison allow
for an examination of curvilinear effects?
That is, if you're comparing a church group,
you got to compare it with an equal group like this.
Number 10: has religion or spirituality
been defined in a way that would also include
pro-social behavior just from the definition?
I think if you watch for those things you're going to have a leg up
on most other people who are paying attention to this particular research.
I hope you got something out of that. I hope that brings a little more clarity
to this often confusing debate
and a last thing I just wont to put in another plug for my podcast:
if you happen to enjoy what you heart tonight, found it enlightening at all,
both I and the author of the the Psych Review, Luke Galen,
we both work on this podcast "Reasonable Doubts",
you can find it at doubtcast.org.
It is one of the most informationally dense podcasts you'll find
that still manages to be funny from time to time.
I thank you very much.
(Applause)
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