Without God, explains the atheist in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “all things are lawful”. It turns out that most people agree — including, perhaps surprisingly, those who don’t believe in God.
Across the world, across demographics, people are more prepared to believe the worst of atheists. So much so that they will intuitively assume murderers and psychopaths don’t have a religion, even when doing so also requires believing something impossible.
Will Gervais, from the University of Kentucky, said he was prompted to carry out the study after research showing that in the US people are less likely to vote for atheists than any other demographic, including Muslims and homosexuals.
“It seemed an odd group to have feelings about,” he said. “It’s not like they really . . . do . . . anything. But people seem to assume religion is an integral element of morality, that without it people are moral wild cards with nothing to keep them honest. Why shouldn’t they be lying, stealing and raping?”
Several investigators have tried to assess the extent of prejudice against atheists. “They associate them with a lot of different moral actions,” said Professor Gervais. “Kicking puppies, cheating at cards, light cannibalism.” The cannibalism paper investigated people’s views as to whether an atheist working in a pathology laboratory would be more likely to eat a cadaver.
Advertisement
He and his colleagues, for their study in Nature Human Behaviour, sought to extend this research by looking at the views of more than 3,000 people from 13 countries, using a particular tool called the conjunction fallacy.
The conjunction fallacy involves describing a person, in this case a man who tortures cats and abducts and murders homeless people. Then half the people were asked which is more probable: that he is a teacher, or that he is a teacher and an atheist. The other half were given the same choice, but where he was a teacher and a believer.
In both cases it is impossible for him to be more likely to be an atheist (or theist) teacher than a teacher, since that category includes both atheists and theists. Yet in this test of unconscious prejudice, when he was explicitly described as an atheist teacher people consistently went for that option as being more likely than teacher alone.
Professor Gervais thinks this is a legacy of our religious past. “It’s interesting it turned up among atheists,” he said. “Our best explanation is it’s a cultural lag. For millennia there’s been so much religious influence, and there’s these pro-religious norms out there. It takes a long time for cultures to shift.”
Could it also be possible though that they have a point? Might atheists really be less moral? “There’s no evidence at all that, say, psychopathic serial killers are more likely to be atheist,” he said. “I suppose it’s possible atheists might be more open minded about light cannibalism.”