Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists

An Author Correction to this article was published on 18 May 2018

Abstract

Mounting evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component 5 Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence10, intergroup conflict11 and tacit prejudice against non-believers12,13. Anti-atheist prejudice—a growing concern in increasingly secular societies14—affects employment, elections, family life and broader social inclusion12,13. Preliminary work in the United States suggests that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion’s putatively necessary role in morality. However, the cross-cultural prevalence and magnitude—as well as intracultural demographic stability—of such intuitions, as manifested in intuitive associations of immorality with atheists, remain unclear. Here, we quantify moral distrust of atheists by applying well-tested measures in a large global sample ( N = 3,256; 13 diverse countries). Consistent with cultural evolutionary theories of religion and morality, people in most—but not all— of these countries viewed extreme moral violations as representative of atheists. Notably, anti-atheist prejudice was even evident among atheist participants around the world. The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries15, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice. Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion’s powerful influence on moral judgements persists, even among non-believers in secular societies.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Across 13 countries, serial murder was seen as more representative of atheists than of religious believers.
Figure 2: Predicted effect of participant belief in God, marginalized across countries and adjusting for individual gender, age and subjective socioeconomic status.

References

  1. Atkinson, Q. D. & Bourrat, P. Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation. Evol. Hum. Behav. 32, 41–49 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Purzycki, B. G . et al. Moralistic gods, supern atural punishment and the expansion of human sociality. Nature 530, 327–330 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Graham, J. & Haidt, J. Beyond beliefs: religions bind individuals into moral communities. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 14, 140–150 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Sosis, R. & Alcorta, C. Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: the evolution of religious behavior. Evol. Anthropol. 12, 264–274 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Norenzayan, A. et al. The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Behav. Brain Sci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14001356 (2016).

  6. Xygalatas, D . et al. Extreme rituals promote prosociality. Psychol. Sci. 24, 1602–1605 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Turchin, P. War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (Pi, 2005).

  8. Botero, C. A. et al. The ecology of religious beliefs. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 16784–16789 (2014).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Baumard, N. & Boyer, P. Explaining moral religions. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 272–280 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Atran, S. & Ginges, J. Religious and sacred imperatives in human conflict. Science 336, 855–857 (2012).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. Neuberg, S. L. et al. Religion and intergroup conflict findings from the Global Group Relations Project. Psychol. Sci. 25, 198–206 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Edgell, P., Gerteis, J. & Hartmann, D. Atheists as “other”: moral boundaries and cultural membership in American society. Am. Sociol. Rev. 71, 211–234 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Gervais, W. M., Shariff, A. F. & Norenzayan, A. Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 101, 1189–1206 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Inglehart, R. & Norris, P. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Worldwide, Many See Belief in God as Essential to Morality (Pew Research Center, 2014).

  16. Johnston, I. The Mozi: A Complete Translation (Columbia Univ. Press, 2010).

    Google Scholar 

  17. Plato. Euthyphro (Internet Classics Archive); http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

  18. Dostoevsky, F. The Brothers Karamazov 12th edn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  19. Gervais, W. M. Everything is permitted? People intuitively judge immorality as representative of atheists. PLoS ONE 9, e92302 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Johnson, D. & Bering, J. Hand of God, mind of man: punishment and cognition in the evolution of cooperation. Evol. Psychol. 4, 219–233 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J. & Henrich, J. The cultural niche: why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci USA 108, 10918–10925 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  22. McKay, R. & Whitehouse, H. Religion and morality. Psychol. Bull. 141, 219–233 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Bloom, P. Religion, morality, evolution. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 63, 179–199 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Hall, D. L., Cohen, A. B., Meyer, K. K., Varley, A. H. & Brewer, G. A. Costly signaling increases trust, even across religious affiliations. Psychol. Sci. 26, 1368–1376 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (eds Austin, W. G. & Worchel, S.), 33–47 (Brooks/Cole, 1979).

  26. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. & Norenzayan, A. The weirdest people in the world? Behav. Brain Sci. 33, 61–83 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning—the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychol. Rev. 90, 293–315 (1983).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. McElreath, R. Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan Vol. 122 (CRC Press, 2016).

    Google Scholar 

  29. Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature 450, 557–559 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  30. De Waal, F. B. The antiquity of empathy. Science 336, 874–876 (2012).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  31. Gervais, W. M. & Najle, M. B. How many atheists are there? Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. Preprint at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/edzda (2017).

  32. Shariff, A. F., Willard, A. K., Muthukrishna, M., Kramer, S. R. & Henrich, J. What is the association between religious affiliation and children’s altruism? Curr. Biol. 26, R699–R700 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  33. rethinking: Statistical Rethinking Book Package. R package v.1.58 ( Richard McElreath, 2015).

  34. Wagenmakers, E.-J., Morey, R. D. & Lee, M. D. Bayesian benefits for the pragmatic researcher. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 25, 169–176 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Kruschke, J. K. Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial Introduction with R (Academic Press, 2010).

    Google Scholar 

  36. Gelman, A., Hill, J. & Yajima, M. Why we (usually) don’t have to worry about multiple comparisons. J. Res. Educ. Eff. 5, 189–211 (2012).

    Google Scholar 

  37. Hoekstra, R., Morey, R. D., Rouder, J. N. & Wagenmakers, E.-J. Robust misinterpretation of confidence intervals. Psychon. B. Rev. 21, 1157–1164 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant to W.M.G. from the John Templeton Foundation (48275). J.B. was supported by grants from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (0077) and a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant (VUW1321). D.X. acknowledges support from the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University. R.T.M. acknowledges the support of the John Templeton Foundation (52257) and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University. M.v.E. acknowledges support by a Veni grant (016.135.135) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of its funders. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

W.M.G. developed the study design in consultation with all the authors. W.M.G. and J.B. performed the analyses. W.M.G., D.X., M.v.E., J.B. and R.T.M. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors. All authors were involved in data collection.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Will M. Gervais.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Studies 1–3, Supplementary Tables 1–7, Supplementary References (PDF 417 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Gervais, W., Xygalatas, D., McKay, R. et al. Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0151 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0151

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0151

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing