Does Religion Make People Nicer?

[♦ nivek ♦]

Does religion make people nicer?

Reason

by Ronald Bailey

 

"Evolutionary biologists argue that there's nothing surprising about

genetically related individuals making sacrifices for their kin: They

are helping some of their own genes get passed along to the next

generation. But what might cause people to make sacrifices for the

good of unrelated strangers? Here, according to University of British

Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff,

religion plays a key role. The authors have winnowed three decades of

empirical evidence looking for examples of religious prosociality,

which they define as 'the idea that religions facilitate acts that

benefit others at a personal cost.' Specifically, their hypothesis is

that religion encourages people to sacrifice their individual fitness

for the benefit of unrelated individuals or for their group. For

example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect

their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer

is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make

believers nervous about being selfish." (10/07/08)

 

http://www.reason.com/news/show/129304.html

[mwc]

Even more interesting are studies that find that invoking an unseen watcher enhances moral behavior. In one amazing experiment, when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test.

I don't know if "nicer" would be the word I'd use for some of these people.

 

mwc

[wonderer1]

Even more interesting are studies that find that invoking an unseen watcher enhances moral behavior. In one amazing experiment, when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test.

I don't know if "nicer" would be the word I'd use for some of these people.

 

mwc

 

How about NICE? ( Neurotically Insecure yet Conceitedly Egotistical)

[chefranden]

Too bad that one can't read the original article with out paying.

 

It would seem that according to the premise that big cities should have a larger percentage of religious people than small towns. My unscientific experience wants to say the opposite is the case.

[Guest]

Anyway to find out who funded/conducted this study? I ask only because their conclusions seem to fly in the face of the oft quoted statistics of secular societies having drasticly lower levels of all social ills. Not to mention that my own morality vastly improved when I realized that I alone am responsible for my actions and I am not some special chosen being, but exactly the same as everyone else.

[gypsy79]

Man, I have always felt that religious people were much meaner. Even though I was a Christian with fundie parents in high school, my friends were all atheist and agnostic because I found them so much nicer and less judgmental.

[buffettphan]

Just the opposite in my experience.

 

Neurotically Insecure yet Conceitedly Egotistical

 

And how about this one:

 

Narrow-minded Idiotic Contemptible Egomaniacs

 

or this -

 

Nasty Ignorant Cruel Evil

 

 

ahhhhhhh...the possibilities are endless..... ;-)

[freeradikle]

To an extent, they are right. Organized religion is very effective at getting the enlisted sheeple to perform selfless and sacrificial acts...for the clergy. The priests, of course, are fleecing the flock at top speed and will not hesitate to sacrifice their congregants (or even lesser clergy) for advancement or protection.

 

Insofar as the article's example of young men dying in war for the tribe--well, it's never the priests who go to war as combatants, is it?

[R. S. Martin]

Does religion make people nicer???

 

Not in my experience.

 

I'm not on William Lane Craig's forums for the pleasant company. I'm there to find out how these people think. In the meantime I put up with horrible treatment, some of which is probably deserved, but not all.

 

Last night I was told why my behaviour is so offensive. It's because I'm so complacent. I looked up the definition of the word "complacent" in answers.com. Apparently it means pretty much what I thought it means: to be satisfied and content with myself and with life.

 

I've suspected for a long time that this is what causes some of their hateful treatment of me, so it was quite a satisfaction to see someone say it.

 

I've noticed that the people who get the most sympathetic and supportive treatment on those forums are the people who confess having some "spiritual struggle." It seems everyone has a story to tell and can identify. Last night I listened to a debate on video by Frank Turek (co-author with Norman L. Geisler of I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist) and Christopher Hitchens on the Existence of God. It was sponsored by the student atheist association of the Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

I notice that when Christians are in friendly territory they are forever promoting the superiority of their religion and morality. However, in this debate Turek doesn't even try to come across as being superior in behaviour. He claims to have a superior moral standard because (in his opinion) it's objective and he claims atheists have to borrow their morals and most other conscious essensials from Christianity. But Christians are only forgiven.

 

Conclusion:

 

1. Christians themselves can't decide whether or not they are good people.
   
2. They are not nice by their own admission; i) they are fallen people and can identify with others only through their struggles with the flesh and doubt, and ii) they are not perfect, only forgiven.
   

Despite all this they are vastly superior to all other human beings and cannot tolerate anyone thinking otherwise. Which I think speaks of very serious emotional problems, just this side of pathology. See my post on religion and emotion in the Theology section.

 

Sorry, long rambling post. Can't seem to sum up my thoughts.

[PandaPirate]

My boyfriend said I was nicer when I was a Christian. Of course I was. I was "subdued."

 

Now I'm pissed off that I was lied to.

[hereticzero]

Sky daddy makes them nervous about being selfish? Whenever the subject of giving to the poor comes up in church, I always heard many selfish remarks--'it's my money (food, whatever), let them get a job' or some other caustic remark. The givers in the church were usually the same people out of a large body of members. I would say that few Christians are not selfish in the same way few atheists are not selfish. Few people actually give for the common good of their fellow man. Yet almost everyone claims they would help someone in need or sacrifice one's self for the common good. Disaster brings out the best in people but only for a short time and then the same old selfish ambitions and stinginess comes out. People will give and give up to a point and then if it looks as if giving is turning into a full time chore, then the giving dries up. The same is true for sacrificing for the common good. Men go to war and they sign up right away and the recruiters are happy, for a time. When the tears dry up, so does the notion to sacrifice for the common good. It does not take religion in one's mind and heart to be willing to sacrifice one's ambitions or life for others, but rather a determine willingness to achieve victory for whatever the sacrifice is being made, and this is only accomplished through people with self-disciple and a personal desire to see it through to the end.

[Guest harambee]

So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer

is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make

believers nervous about being selfish." (10/07/08)

]

 

While one might say this about some Christians, it certainly could not be said about Jesus. He wasn't 'nervous about being selfish,' yet gave up everything out of love not only for those unrelated to him, but for the very people who murdered him.

 

Christianity teaches to put others before self not out of fear, but because it is the only way for life to be meaningful and for God's spirit to reign on earth.

 

In fact, the very idea that one could be selfless out of self-preserving fear is contradictory. If indeed someone is selfless because they fear God's wrath, then it is not really selflessness at all, but good 'ol selfish self-preservation. The author here is trying to take something beautiful - self-giving sacrifice - and turn it into something ugly and familiar - self-preservation. Nice trick, but that's all it is.

[♦ nivek ♦]

Too bad that one can't read the original article with out paying.

 

It would seem that according to the premise that big cities should have a larger percentage of religious people than small towns. My unscientific experience wants to say the opposite is the case.

 

Chef,

 

I dunno what you ran into, but the entire article is easily accessible.

 

Does Religion Make People Nicer?

Only if they think Sky Big Brother is watching

http://www.reason.com/news/show/129304.html

Ronald Bailey | October 7, 2008

 

In his new movie Religulous, comedian Bill Maher makes wicked fun of the religiously credulous. But it turns out that the folks who believe in talking snakes and seventy-two virgins per martyr may be on to something. As whacky as some dogmas are, religions do appear to encourage generosity and honesty. At least that is the claim made in a fascinating review article, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" (subscription required) published in the current issue of Science.

 

Evolutionary biologists argue that there's nothing surprising about genetically related individuals making sacrifices for their kin: They are helping some of their own genes get passed along to the next generation. But what might cause people to make sacrifices for the good of unrelated strangers? Here, according to University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, religion plays a key role.

 

The authors have winnowed three decades of empirical evidence looking for examples of religious prosociality, which they define as "the idea that religions facilitate acts that benefit others at a personal cost." Specifically, their hypothesis is that religion encourages people to sacrifice their individual fitness for the benefit of unrelated individuals or for their group. For example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make believers nervous about being selfish.

 

This observation accords with numerous studies showing that people behave better when they think that someone may be watching them. For example, one remarkable study in 2006 found that just being under the gaze of eyes on a poster nearly tripled the contributions to an office coffee kitty. Exposing participants in a laboratory economic game to computer-generated eyespots while they played made them twice as generous as those who were not. Another study found that participants in a laboratory economic game were nearly four times stingier with other players when they thought they were anonymous than when they thought they were being observed. In other words, watched people are nicer people. Why should that be? It's because we want to have the reputation of being cooperative and prosocial so that other people, especially strangers, will want to cooperate with us.

 

"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputational concerns among believers, just as the cognitive awareness of human watchers does among believers and non-believers alike," hypothesize the authors. But supernatural oversight is even better because it "offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring."

 

So does religion work, in the sense of encouraging prosocial other-regarding behavior? It depends. In one famous 1973 study, degrees of religiosity did not predict which students would stop to help someone lying on a sidewalk appearing to be sick. However, in another experiment, two players would simultaneously decide how much money to withdraw from the same envelope—if their combined withdrawals exceeded the amount in the envelope, neither would get any money. Systematically, less money was withdrawn when the game was played at religious kibbutzim than when it was played at secular kibbutzim. This finding supported the researchers' prediction that "men who participate in communal prayer most frequently will exhibit the highest levels of cooperation."

 

So why do religious believers tend cooperate more? In one illuminating study cited by the researchers, volunteers were given the option to raise money for a sick child's medical bills. Some would-be volunteers were told that it was very likely that they would be asked to help, while others were told that there was only a small chance that they would be called on. "In the latter condition, participants could reap the social benefits of feeling (or appearing) helpful without the cost of the actual altruistic act. Only in the latter situation was a link between religiosity and volunteering evident," claim Norenzayan and Shariff. Religion played a role when it appeared that volunteering would improve one's reputation without much personal cost.

 

Even more interesting are studies that find that invoking an unseen watcher enhances moral behavior. In one amazing experiment, when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test. Other researchers report that when experimental subjects were primed with religious words, they cheated significantly less on a subsequent task. Similarly, Norenzayan and Shariff found that subjects in experimental economic games were more generous when God concepts were implicitly activated before play.

 

The authors hypothesize that the belief in morally concerned gods who keep track of who's been naughty or nice helps create and stabilize large-scale societies. "Large groups, which until recently lacked institutionalized social-monitoring mechanisms, are vulnerable to collapse because of high rates of freeloading. If unwavering and pervasive belief in moralizing gods buffered against such freeloading, then belief in such gods should be more likely in larger human groups where the threat of freeloading is most acute," suggest the authors. In fact, a cross cultural analysis of 186 societies confirms this prediction: The larger a society, the more likely its members believe in deities that are concerned about human morality.

 

In small hunter-gatherer bands or subsistence farming villages, it's pretty easy to keep track of just how cooperative your neighbors are. But when groups grow to encompass thousands and eventually millions of strangers, a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky can watch how your fellow citizens behave when you can't. And even better, Sky Big Brother can punish them with eternal damnation if they swindle you. One big downside is that groups have different Sky Big Brothers, which means that "the same mechanisms involved in ingroup altruism may also facilitate outgroup antagonism." In other words, kill the infidels!

 

Shariff and Norenzayan note that while religion remains a powerful facilitator of prosociality in large groups, modern societies have devised secular replacements for Sky Big Brother, including courts, police, and other contract-enforcing institutions. Also, the modern world is headed toward a transparent society in which social monitoring will be nearly as omnipresent as that of a hunter-gatherer band. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies will enable anyone to assess your reputation for prosociality with a few mouse clicks. Sky Big Brother is being outsourced to the Web.

 

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

[Guest]

So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer

is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make

believers nervous about being selfish." (10/07/08)

]

 

While one might say this about some Christians, it certainly could not be said about Jesus. He wasn't 'nervous about being selfish,' yet gave up everything out of love not only for those unrelated to him, but for the very people who murdered him.

 

Christianity teaches to put others before self not out of fear, but because it is the only way for life to be meaningful and for God's spirit to reign on earth.

 

In fact, the very idea that one could be selfless out of self-preserving fear is contradictory. If indeed someone is selfless because they fear God's wrath, then it is not really selflessness at all, but good 'ol selfish self-preservation. The author here is trying to take something beautiful - self-giving sacrifice - and turn it into something ugly and familiar - self-preservation. Nice trick, but that's all it is.

 

The only problem with that is jesus didn't give up anything. He was magicly un-deadened and lives forever in the sky, co-controller of the universe!

 

Pretty sweet deal to me, far cry from a "sacrifice".