So there’s this post over at Cognitive Daily, a post which i would have titled something more like how i titled this post. But that’s OK, they’re cognitive psychologists not marketers. God knows we need more people like them. I’m going to give a brief summary of what they’re reporting on before i get to what i got out of it, but really you should go read it, it’s fascinating.
Very, very short version of it though: experimenters decide to check if being primed–having an idea stuck in their brain without the experimentees realizing it–with a god concept before being given $10 and told that they could leave however much they wanted behind for a second volunteer, would make people leave more money behind. It’s called the dictator game. Anyway, here’s the graph:
Holy crap but thinking about god makes people halfway decent!
Yeah, so you know from the title of this post that that’s not the whole story. Maybe that’s why they titled their report the way they did. (Although i’d still go for provocative over suspenseful any day of the week.) The researchers then went ahead and said “well, we don’t know if that was just god or our test population (college students) or what” so they did it again. This time with a broader population and priming people not only with supernatural concepts, but also with ideas like “civic,” “contract,” etc. Here’s the graph:
Wow, huh? Purely materialistic ideas have a completely equivalent effect to otherworldly ideas, subconsciously. Not atheists–and they did ask about religious belief, see the CogDaily article for details–rationalizing some sort of ad hoc “we’re moral too” stuff. Nope: everybody was affected the same by the secular prime. And, perhaps not surprisingly the atheists were not affected by the god prime.
Now, that’s not surprising, but it is very significant. Because that says that god is less effective than secular ideas. A higher percentage of people were affected by the secular ideas than by the god ones. Add to this the fact that christians wish evil onto muslims, and that muslims do evil unto christians, and that everybody just likes beating on the jews, And this adds a new twist to the old “argument” between religious morality and secular morality: not only does a secular morality not demand violence be perpetrated against people merely because of their beliefs, it also makes more people good people.
Technorati Tags: morality, experiment, atheism, dictator game
{ 2 } Comments
Thanks for the writeup. I agree — fascinating stuff. I’m not sure I buy your argument that “god is less effective than secular ideas.” It’s roughly equivalent, not less effective. It’s less effective for atheists, but over the whole population, even with atheists averaged in, it’s equally effective.
Also, this is a very small study. More research clearly needs to be done.
But I do like your headline! I was trying to be diplomatic with mine. The title for the journal article itself is even worse: “God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game.”
Yeah, i was pretty tired when i wrote that. What i should have said is that secular ideas are equally effective, but over a broader population. Meaning that secular ideas have a larger effect when measured against the total population. Especially when in a significantly less theistic population.
I suppose that one of my assumptions, that people of other religions aren’t affected by the god of some other religion, is faulty if you don’t mention what kind of god you’re talking about. As they didn’t in the study. But i do wonder what kind of result they would get if instead of using the generic terms for spirituality that they did, they primed with words like “christian” “jesus” “muhammed” etc. Words that are intended to be positive, but which also have different meanings in different populations. I’m pretty sure that the result would be (drastically) different.
I agree wholeheartedly though: all that this does is shows that there are techniques that work well at getting at the real effect religion has on people, and that we should really use them.
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