ain’t that the truth

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.

[tags]morality, experiment, atheism, dictator game[/tags]

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