Intuitive moral bias favors the religiously faithful.
Journal
Scientific reports
ISSN: 2045-2322
Titre abrégé: Sci Rep
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101563288
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
07 Aug 2024
07 Aug 2024
Historique:
received:
17
01
2024
accepted:
18
07
2024
medline:
8
8
2024
pubmed:
8
8
2024
entrez:
7
8
2024
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
Belief in powerful supernatural agents that enforce moral norms has been theoretically linked with cooperative altruism and prosociality. Correspondingly, prior research reveals an implicit association between atheism and extreme antisociality (e.g., serial murder). However, findings centered on associations between lack of faith and moral transgression do not directly address the hypothesized conceptual association between religious belief and prosociality. Accordingly, we conducted two pre-registered experiments depicting a "serial helper" to assess biases related to extraordinary helpfulness, mirroring designs depicting a serial killer used in prior cross-cultural work. In both a predominantly religious society (the U.S., Study 1) and a predominantly secular society (New Zealand, Study 2), we successfully replicated previous research linking atheism with transgression, and obtained evidence for a substantially stronger conceptual association between religiosity and virtue. The results suggest that stereotypes linking religiosity with prosociality are both real and global in scale.
Identifiants
pubmed: 39112535
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-67960-4
pii: 10.1038/s41598-024-67960-4
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
18291Informations de copyright
© 2024. The Author(s).
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