Do we trust believers more?

British psychologists Leah Giddings (Leah Giddings) and Thomas Dunn (Thomas Dumm) decided to test how widespread and persistent bias against atheists. To do this, they conducted a study in which 100 students (30 men and 70 women) from Nottingham Trent University (UK) took part. 42% of them were atheists, 33% were Christians, the rest professed other religions. Psychologists told students a story about a man who had a minor accident and left without leaving his contacts. Then he found the wallet and calmly took all the money for himself. Half of the participants were then asked to rate the likelihood that this immoral person is a teacher (the first option) or a religious teacher (the second option). The rest of the students were offered another choice – a teacher or an atheist teacher.

Given the lack of information, the first answer was correct in both cases, since both the believing teacher and the atheist fall under it. However, some students made a logical error and chose the second option – but it is noteworthy that participants from the second group made this mistake much more often (8% of errors in the first group and 66% in the second). Apparently, subconsciously immoral behavior evoked associations precisely with the “typical atheist”.

To test the persistence of these prejudices, the researchers gave the students statistics on what percentage of the population were believers or atheists, and asked them to answer the same question again. Students from the first group were less likely to make mistakes this time. However, in the second group, the number of mistakes did not practically decrease, which shows that such biases are too deep.

It is interesting that subconscious distrust of atheists was demonstrated not only by believers, but also by unbelieving students (although less frequently).

Read more:

• Religion and morality: is there a connection between them?

What explains such prejudices? As the authors suggest, it is believed that believers feel themselves under the constant supervision of higher powers and therefore always try to adhere to moral standards, unlike atheists, who do not feel such supervision. Moral norms and rules of conduct prescribed in certain religions are also common to all adherents of these religions. On the contrary, although many atheists also adhere to strict moral and moral principles, there is no general code of these principles that all atheists follow.

However, the presence or absence of such prejudices largely depends on the country and culture. And what about the attitude towards atheists in Russia? Here are the results of a poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation at the end of 2013¹.

• About 20% of respondents did not know the word “atheism” at all
• 42% associate atheism simply with a lack of faith in God, obviously negative associations occur less frequently (less than 10% of respondents)
• 61% are indifferent to atheism, 9% are positive, 20% are negative
• 75% believe that atheists are fundamentally no different from believers
• Only 4% of respondents refer to atheists with condemnation
• Only 6% of those who identified themselves as atheists said they had experienced discrimination because of their atheist beliefs.

Подробнее см. L. Giddings, T. Dunn « The Robustness of Anti-Atheist Prejudice as Measured by Way of Cognitive Errors», The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2016, vol. 26, № 2.

¹ fom.ru/obshchestvo/11289