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Study: Religious regard atheists as trustworthy as...rapists. Really.

Good Lt

Graduate Poster
Good Lt
Joined
Aug 25, 2007
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Small sample sizes for sure, but still.

http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/11/30/religious-people-do-not-believe-in-atheists-study/

The resulting paper, published in the current online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, includes six studies all designed to measure people’s perception of an atheist’s trustworthiness. The first study asked 351 Americans from across the country to compare the trustworthiness of an atheist and a gay man, since both represent groups often described as threatening to majority religious values. They rated atheists significantly higher than gay men on distrust, though lower on levels of disgust.


The second study recruited 105 UBC undergrads —they purposely targeted a more liberal sample from a less-religious nation — to test whether distrust of atheists is more pronounced than distrust of other groups, including Muslims. The students read a description of an untrustworthy man who pretended to leave insurance information after backing his car into a parked vehicle and were asked to say whether it was more likely the man was either a Christian, Muslim, rapist or an atheist. People were far more likely to say he was either an atheist or a rapist and not part of a religious group. They did not significantly differentiate atheists from rapists, something Mr. Gervais found disconcerting.
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Well, DUH.

Religion is morality, and without religious belief, you're basically just a rapist.

:rolleyes:
 
Meanwhile in other news the sun set today - pictures at 11
 
The stupidity of this link/thread is glaring and tedious on so many levels (and yet perfect for this forum). Yes "religious people" tend to think atheists = immoral rapist SOBs. Brilliant. White people also hate black people; the KKK is proof!

":rolleyes:" is right.
 
Well hold on now -- how do we know we atheists are more trustworthy? Maybe we're worthless sacks of crap.

Maybe the students are underestimating our untrustworthiness.
 
Atheists Roughly as Distrusted as Rapists

Sniff -- Why They don't Like Us

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~will/Gervais%20et%20al-%20Atheist%20Distrust.pdf

Do You Believe in Atheists? Distrust Is Central to Anti-Atheist Prejudice

Will M. Gervais, Azim F. Shariff, and Ara Norenzayan

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Online First Publication, November 7, 2011. doi: 10.1037/a0025882

Present Research and Hypotheses

If religiosity is used as a signal of trustworthiness, atheists should be seen as less trustworthy than their “God-fearing” counterparts, particularly by individuals who strongly believe in God.

Therefore,
Hypothesis 1: Stereotypes of atheists should center on themes of distrust. This should be more true for atheists than for other comparable out groups disliked by religious groups but not
seen to pose a specific trust-based threat (e.g., homosexuals).

Hypothesis 2: Anti-atheist prejudice should be most evident in measures of distrust, rather than in more general measures of dislike or other specific (non-trust-based) appraisals.

Hypothesis 3: Belief in God should, in turn, more strongly predict distrust of atheists than generalized dislike of atheists. This relationship should be specifically mediated by a belief that people behave better when they believe they are under supernatural surveillance.

Hypothesis 4: Prejudice against atheists should be context specific, especially evident when the need for trust—rather than other dimensions such as likeability or pleasantness—is particularly potent.
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<SNIP>

Conclusion

These studies are an initial investigation into anti-atheist prejudice, a common and understudied type of prejudice. Atheists are among the least liked groups of people in many parts of the world, and the present studies help to explain why. The present six studies converged on the conclusion that distrust is at the core of this particularly powerful, peculiar, and prevalent form of prejudice. Although religions continue to exert great influence on most human lives, the numbers of nonreligious people have continually grown, leading to a great degree of cultural polarization. In recent years, the topic of atheism has broken into public consciousness, leading to boisterous debate in popular culture and overshadowing the tremendous potential that the scientific study of atheism—and reactions to atheism—may hold for scientific understanding of the diversity of prejudice and the psychological, cultural, and evolutionary underpinnings of religion.
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Sigh. I'll have to respond with a quote from Marcus Aurelius.

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.
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:th:
 
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It must suck to have millions of religious people projecting their shadow-selves onto you.
 
I stopped trusting polls long ago. People still have the ability to "judge" another human being on their own. I don't like to judge people, but it is an automatic response, and it is colored by our own prejudice and experience. That doesn't mean that we can't move beyond our own initial reactions, but it does mean that trying to quantify another human being through tests is dubious at best, and destructive when spun by disingenuous people, especially when they have a preconceived agenda.
 
Damnit, they're on to us. Time to start the raping and pillaging. Excuse me while I book a ticket to Salma Hayak's house.
 
TheGoldcountry said:
I stopped trusting polls long ago. People still have the ability to "judge" another human being on their own. I don't like to judge people, but it is an automatic response, and it is colored by our own prejudice and experience. That doesn't mean that we can't move beyond our own initial reactions, but it does mean that trying to quantify another human being through tests is dubious at best, and destructive when spun by disingenuous people, especially when they have a preconceived agenda.
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I thought the poll was about the perception that religious people have of atheists, in stead of the actual trustworthiness. It doesn't seem to have been started to test how trustworthy atheists really are.
 
What? I stopped....."treating".......my...err...."victim" for this? Really?

Sheesh I'm so upset I have to...uhm..."treat victim four"....even harsher than before.....
 
Bram Kaandorp said:
Originally Posted by TheGoldcountry
I stopped trusting polls long ago. People still have the ability to "judge" another human being on their own. I don't like to judge people, but it is an automatic response, and it is colored by our own prejudice and experience. That doesn't mean that we can't move beyond our own initial reactions, but it does mean that trying to quantify another human being through tests is dubious at best, and destructive when spun by disingenuous people, especially when they have a preconceived agenda.
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I thought the poll was about the perception that religious people have of atheists, in stead of the actual trustworthiness. It doesn't seem to have been started to test how trustworthy atheists really are.
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Agreed.

TheGoldcountry, are you saying that the testers were deliberately trying to make religious people look bad, and that most people do in fact trust atheists as much as they trust Christians?

That doesn't hold true, in my personal (limited) experience, and doesn't fit with other polls I've seen. The results of this test, as a generalization, seem accurate to me.
 
Is it me, or is one of the massive flaws with the study the seeming failure to control for the perceived prevalence of atheists vs. the perceived prevalence of rapists?
If you attend a sports event in an area were atheists are pretty common- even the majority- and you picked an individual at random, which would you say they would be more likely to be, a rapist or an atheist?
Would it be fair from your answer to that question to state that you think that atheists are more likely to be sports fans than rapists are likely to be sports fans?
In British Columbia, where this question was asked, 36% of eth population report no religious affiliation on the census, making them eth largest single group (although all Christians combined amounts to 53%- 31% protestant, 17% Catholic 5% other Christian denomination). I would suspect that, as with most (secular) universities in the west the proportion of atheists there will be higher than in the surroundings population. Given these demographics, is it really unusual that when asked a question about whether someone is more likely to be an atheist or a rapist people chose atheist?
 
bigred said:
The stupidity of this link/thread is glaring and tedious on so many levels (and yet perfect for this forum). Yes "religious people" tend to think atheists = immoral rapist SOBs. Brilliant. White people also hate black people; the KKK is proof!

":rolleyes:" is right.
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The study purposely sampled a population more likely to be liberal to avoid the 'sample from the KKK' effect.
 
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