SIO307: Newly Published Study Shows Atheists are Prejudiced...

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 307. I'm Thomas, and that's Science Person of the Year, Lindsey Osterman, an award I just invented. Do you accept? I know I'm spraying this on you.

0:00:21 Lindsey: Aww, that's nice. I have so many people to thank. Mostly you, I think.

0:00:27 Thomas: Yeah. Well, we, uh, we were off, I don't know, was that a week? I guess we were off. A week.

0:00:27 Lindsey: Oh, can't tell. It's like a year, I think.

0:00:32 Thomas: Um, but we're back and I'm, don't, what are we talking about today?

0:00:36 Lindsey: We're talking about an article entitled, "Are Atheists Unprejudiced? Forms of Non-Belief and Prejudice Among Anti-Liberal," or toward, excuse me, "Prejudiced Toward Anti-liberal and Mainstream Religious Groups." I found this, I like to stay up on the literature about religiosity and lack thereof and see what the psych people are saying about those dimensions, and I found this one and it seemed very, very interesting, so I thought maybe, uh, SIO listeners would enjoy it.

0:01:03 Thomas: I am, I read the, uh, abstract, read the title, and didn't, still don't know what it's saying, so that's always a good sign. Is that just me, or is it written very weirdly? Are atheists unprejudiced, so is that like, so are they, are they suggesting that the, the cultural expectation is that they're not, and now they're challenging it, is that what the background of this is, okay?

0:01:11 Lindsey: It's, uh, it's not the best writing I've ever seen, um, it's Yes. Yes.

0:01:25 Lindsey: Yes. It is, yeah. There's... there's a literature, and we'll talk a little bit about this, but there's research literature that has claimed in the past that atheists or non-religious people in general are less prejudice than highly religious people. So yeah, that's why they framed it that way, they

0:01:39 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. All right, and they seek to perhaps contradict that claim, counter that claim.

0:01:49 Lindsey: They do, they, they actually, they, the lead author on the study actually has another article that, uh, was published a couple years ago that is along a similar theme and could give us some insight here. So the, the title of, of that article was, "Are Atheists Undogmatic?" And similarly, we're seeking to challenge the view that they are.

0:02:04 Thomas: Right. This seems to be coming from people perhaps tied to religion and religious institutions, maybe.

0:02:14 Lindsey: They seem to be very skeptical of atheists. I won't speculate about why that might be. But yes.

0:02:20 Thomas: Okay, I'm going to keep it. Going to keep it fair and balanced here, I guess. I mean, I have no problem saying it's likely that some religious people are trying to maybe prove that atheists suck, but that's just me. I'll keep that opinion. You don't have to sign off on that.

0:02:24 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's our shtick.

0:02:36 Lindsey: I mean, that is essentially their hypothesis. So you're on pretty firm ground. But well,

0:02:39 Thomas: Okay. So yeah, that's why I'm excited to talk about this because I know most of our listeners, if not like 99% of them are atheists, I think. I guess I haven't polled them recently, but I'm curious. Are we unprejudiced, Lindsay? Or are we prejudiced?

0:02:57 Lindsey: Well, it depends on what you mean by prejudice. So the way they looked at this question in the study was interesting in a couple of different ways. So let me give you a little bit of background on this research area that they're working from. They are building on this literature, again, that has examined this connection between religiosity and prejudice. And that literature has broadly indicated that religious fundamentalism is associated with more prejudice, but it's also indicated that just religiosity in general seems to predict prejudice toward a variety of different targets. So there's more prejudice toward LGBTQ plus individuals, toward single mothers, toward religious outgroups, including atheists, actually very highly including atheists.

0:03:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:39 Lindsey: Religious people really tend to not like atheists and, you know, toward feminists and ethnic and racial minorities. So this is, these are all established findings in this particular literature. And to explain these findings, past researchers have suggested that prejudice might be higher among religious people, highly religious people for a couple of reasons. So part of it might be that religious people often have more conservative or authoritarian values, and that would lead to more intolerance of various marginalized groups who violate their conservative values. And religiosity has also been associated with something called need for cognitive closure, which could explain this finding about prejudice as well.

0:04:20 Thomas: I okay. I'm just thinking about my religious family as I want to do on these, uh, when we do these kinds of episodes and all of this checks every single box. Like I, you know, so not to paint with a broad brush, but at least in kind of my experience, those are the major factors, which is like a need to have all these answers to stuff, you having a very set view of the world and like who's good and who's bad and, you black and white ish thinking, but also a lot like proudly judgmental, you Now, oftentimes they're like they wouldn't even shy away from you saying that they'd be like, yeah, we should be more, we you Should discriminate more against people who are the kind of the bad kind of people sort of thing.

0:04:30 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:04:59 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Right. And yeah, this is this is exactly what the literature is describing that those kinds of attitudes tend to be more prevalent as religiosity increases. And I was going to define need for cognitive closure, but you actually just did it perfectly for me. So thank you.

0:05:13 Thomas: Total accident.

0:05:15 Lindsey: Yeah. But yeah, no, you described it exactly. It's intolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, thinking in black and white terms. So yeah. So that is higher among highly religious people. And so some researchers have suggested that people high in need for closure are attracted to religious fundamentalism for exactly the reason you just said, right? It provides, or it appears to provide, sort of certainty in terms of big questions about life and the world. World.

0:05:36 Thomas: Now, here's my question. I'm sure I'm jumping the gun and feel free to be mad at me forever. But are these folks, these fine researchers trying to include atheists in the umbrella of the highly religious as they're like, you know, well, they're highly religious means you're either super Catholic or super Jewish or super atheist. You know, like, is it that kind of thing.

0:06:02 Lindsey: That's where they're going. Yeah. Yeah, being sort of dogmatically non-religious could look very similar to being dogmically religious. And they make that case in sort of an overdetermined way.

0:06:02 Thomas: Ah, geez. Interesting. What do you think about that?

0:06:15 Lindsey: Yeah? You know, there are aspects of it that I'm willing to entertain. I mean, I think I've certainly met some folks who are atheists who would probably meet that description, but like, as a as a group, I'm I'm skeptical as to whether or not that really describes most atheists. Yeah.

0:06:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:34 Thomas: Especially if we're just talking about atheists and not like a movement type atheist or, you know, a super activist move. If we're juste talking, because I'm pretty sure based on, I know we've kind of looked at these numbers from time to time for different things. I think that the movement atheists are but a fraction of the people who will answer that they don't believe in God on polls. Polls, and It might be, you know, maybe you get the result, just hypothetically, maybe you get some kind of results that show that, you people are active, movement atheists, maybe they, you know, are a little bit, you know, zealous about their whole atheism thing, whatever, I don't think that's going to apply to like the vast majority of people who just say they're atheists on polls would be my kind prior on this?

0:06:39 Lindsey: Sure. Yeah.

0:07:15 Lindsey: I would suspect that too, and actually that that converges kind of nicely with a point that um, that these researchers make, um, so they they point out as one of their criticisms of the past literature that, um, these findings about about, uh, high religiosity being associated with more prejudice have essentially been used to assert the opposite, um, thing as well, right, that non-religious people are therefore less prejudicial and less rigid in their thinking, um, but they think that that there's potentially like a measurement issue here, so they think that, like, so this is actually very similar to the stuff we talked about with, um, political ideology, so one method of of measuring religiosity is to use kind of a bipolar measure ranging from not at all religious at one end to extremely religious, and then assessing religiosity that way.

0:08:02 Lindsey: And so these researchers are making the point that lumping everyone who's at the very low end of that continuum into one category could miss something important, right? Because agnostics, atheists, anti-theists, spiritual but not religious folks, they might all be in the Not at All Religious group, but they could look quite different from each other in some important ways. And I think that that's reasonable.

0:08:26 Thomas: Yeah. And the other point I was going to make is I imagine a lot of people listening might be thinking, you know, well, how dare these people even make this comparison? Because it's like, you Know, at the old, like, I'm just not a stamp collector. I'm just not, you Now, it's not atheism isn't a religion. It's a just lack of thing.

0:08:38 Lindsey: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:08:42 Thomas: You know, if I say, if you say the moon landings fake, and I say I don't believe you, it's not like I'm dogmatically anti-moon landing. And I think that those are, I valid arguments, but I would say that I could see it, you know, a little percentage the other way too, which is, well, whenever people subdivide into a group, they're going to have some in-group kind of out-group stuff. You know, they are to some biases. They are going, as we have seen, we have some people in atheism who are not cool. And so, I guess I just wanted to say that, I see that argument and I think it does apply somewhat, but I'm willing to grant that atheists as a group also would show some kind of in-group-ish stuff.

0:08:50 Lindsey: Exactly.

0:09:25 Lindsey: You know, that segues beautifully into the last part of their introduction, right?

0:09:28 Thomas: Oh, okay. It's like we planned all

0:09:30 Lindsey: So yeah, I know. No, seriously. They bring up a number of these points. So that's nice segue into this.

0:09:30 Thomas: This. Okay.

0:09:36 Lindsey: Yeah. So the last part of their intro, they're making this kind of like overdetermined argument for why atheists would be especially prejudice, right? And so the first thing that they say, and you anticipated this nicely, was that they think that non-belief constitutes an ideological position. So they say that nonbelievers' values, ideas, and worldviews are all marked by a godless vision of humankind, society, and the world, and that this is therefore inherently ideological. Now, I mean, I think that you just provided the most common counter for this, which is like, Like, yeah, if I don't believe in Zeus, you don't say that that, you know, defines my worldview.

0:10:03 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, if I don't believe that a turtle is holding up the world, you're like, well, it's an ideological non-turtle-based ideology. Ideology. You're fundamentalist and you're not turtle thing with the, and that infects all your views.

0:10:25 Lindsey: Yeah, right. And I think that a lot of people really do think about it that way. And, you Know, I especially, yeah.

0:10:29 Thomas: Oh, for sure. I look as someone who has done the podcast, got off of movies and been subjected to, as I know a lot of our listeners to listen to that, I've been subjected to a lot of the religious movies that, uh, you know, you get, you Get a picture of their worldview and it's definitely that it's like atheists are just dogmatically done. Like, yeah. So that view does certainly exist among the religious about atheists

0:10:53 Lindsey: Yeah, I think it really does. And especially when, like, one thing that I think is important to consider here is, like, was somebody, like raised in a secular household and just has never really thought about religion? Like has never really considered a God belief? Or, um, did they become an atheist after being raised with religion and, like, how long ago did that happen? Like, I think that all of those things can predict the extent to which, um, your your non-belief in God actually is guiding your perceptions and your thoughts on a day, like, how how salient it is, I guess, um. So yeah, I don't, I don't like the argue the argument here that non-belief per se is is an ideological position. That doesn't make sense to me.

I think you could probably make that case for certain subgroups. Like, if you identify as a secular humanist, you are telling me something sort of positive about your ideology and your values. But yeah, otherwise, yeah, I don't think that there's a lot of support for the way that they're framing this. And this is fun. So to support the point that the non-religious are ideological, they point to past research showing that non-believers tend to endorse more liberal moral values, value autonomy, and be more politically left, and to have a low opinion of political conservatism, as well as work showing that they value evidence, rationality, and science. So like, especially the political piece feels like a weird way to make the argument that being non-religious is an ideology.

0:11:24 Thomas: Right right yeah right

0:12:16 Lindsey: Would you make the same claim about, you know, women being an ideology given that they tend to lean more liberal than men? It doesn't, this, that didn't make any sense to me. The last piece, though, where they're citing this work about about the strong valuation of evidence, rationality, and science, right? That's actually this idea of maybe there's a culture of kind of like hyper rationality and sort of, putting you these things on kind of a pedestal in this community. And then maybe that's more common than you see in other groups. Like that one, I'm actually more willing to entertain.

0:12:42 Thomas: I Sure. Yeah.

0:12:43 Lindsey: I mean, um, I do think that there is, you know, some domination of that, um,

0:12:47 Thomas: Absolutely. And, you know, we've seen those bad examples. Uh, you know, there can be a culture of like, one big, one of the constant criticisms I've had of, the of atheist community is replacing us. I don't say us. Cause like, I think in the, in, in the past I did this too. Um, our biases are not biases and thinking we're just totally really rational, you know, people and mistaking the fact that basically mistaking our maybe oftentimes can't speak for everybody, obviously, but mistaking are widely white male identity for rationality and not realizing when we're doing that. I think that's been a real weakness of the community.

0:12:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes. Yes.

0:13:26 Lindsey: I agree with that, and I think that that, that is kind of what they're trying to tap in here with, it would tap into here with this point, so I'll Well,

0:13:33 Thomas: Well, no, I don't know about that. Hold on. They I think these people sound to me like they're coming from a conservative point of of view. And I don't think they would give a shit that, you know, about the white identity part of it, would they? Or are they actually criticizing that?

0:13:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Maybe. Maybe they wouldn't frame it in the same terms that you are, but They, so, so one, one point that they make, after they say, like, you know, there's this, this additional valuation of rationality and evidence and all that, then they, they add the quote, "strongly valuing rationality results in the moralization of it and a willingness to punish those who are perceived as irrational." And so when I read that, I was like, I was thinking of, you know, sort of the Sam Harris brand of atheism. And yeah, I think they have a point. However, to qualify, they cited a study when they made that claim about strongly valuating rationality leading to the moralisation of it, because I was Like, that seems strong, right? So I looked up the study that they cited for this claim, and it actually doesn't at all say what they say it does.

0:13:49 Thomas: Okay. Sure. Yep.

0:14:30 Thomas: That's always

0:14:31 Lindsey: So, yeah. In fact, the studythat they're citing, they're doing some scale validation work to show that valuing rationality is a distinct dimension from moralizing it. And so those traits are correlated around 0.3, which probably means that like, yeah, there's a little bit of relationship there. And I'm guessing that if you do moralize rationality, you're probably also more likely to value it. But like the results that they present here are far, far cry from if you highly value rationality. You will therefore moralize it and atheists do this, right?

0:14:31 Thomas: Fun.

0:15:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:02 Lindsey: The one thing I will concede is that in that same study that they referenced, they do show it's a significant difference. It's pretty small effect, indicating that atheists are a little higher on the moralizing dimension than religious individuals. So fine.

0:15:14 Thomas: Of moralizing of Of rationality or of anything.

0:15:17 Lindsey: Moralizing of rationality.

0:15:17 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, he scared me. I was like, Jeff, that couldn't be right. All right.

0:15:18 Lindsey: Yeah. No. No, not at all. Not at all. So it is there. It is a significant effect. It isn't a huge one. So I think that the way that they're presenting this is maybe a little bit too strong, but, you know, I'll give them a part of this point.

0:15:23 Thomas: Gotcha. Okay. But the, yeah, but the point is often, I have learned this from you doing the show. You can apparently get published a lot of places and cite stuff and just completely misread what you cite and cite it, cite the study still in support of your claims. And somehow that all gets through.

0:15:49 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard, right? Like, as a peer reviewer reading these studies, you kind of have to assume, at least to a certain extent, that people have done their due diligence before, you now, submitting their studies and that they're not misrepresenting things. Like, it is a pretty large burden, I think, to put on peer reviewers to be like, single citation to make sure that it's, yeah,

0:16:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a topic we've touched on, but also could touch on again for another show is peer review and all that. I

0:16:19 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that would be an interesting topic to tackle more centrally. Yeah. But anyway, so yeah, so these researchers say that if non-believers are indeed ideological, then this leaves open the possibility that they would be prejudiced toward groups who oppose or even simply just don't share their views, their worldviews. So I think their logic here is that, you know, non-believers are liberals who worship rationality. And so just like conservatives who worship a god express prejudice toward groups who are dissimilar or threaten their values, you know, by like just being gay or whatever, non-believers should express a symmetrical prejudice toward group groups who are just dissimilar or threaten values. Right?

0:16:59 Thomas: Already hate this a lot.

0:17:01 Lindsey: I know, it's awesome. Right. And the two groups, the two group that they choose for their study, the groups that they think should be threatening to secularists and therefore that they should show prejudice against, are you ready for this?

0:17:11 Thomas: Oh, geez. I can't wait.

0:17:13 Lindsey: Yeah. The two groups are religious fundamentalists and anti-gay activists.

0:17:21 Thomas: Yeah. I just how easy to just measure my bias against an anti-gay activist. What?

0:17:27 Lindsey: Yeah. No, I'll tell you how they how they measure it. But like, I so they're starting with, you Christians don't like ethnic minorities because of these things, but also nonbelievers symmetrically show prejudice toward anti- gay activists. And that's the same. Like, come on, man.

0:17:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. We're Gonna Show How prejudiced atheists are. Okay, on a scale of one to ten, how big a fan of Nazis are you? Prejudiced, yeah.

0:17:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. I just, I'm so rigid in my non-belief that I am super prejudiced against racists. It's

0:18:02 Thomas: I don't like when people try to use you, uh, unscientific therapies to get rid of people's gayness, you know, and to the point where it's like, often these people have horrible mental health consequences, suicide and all that. Yeah, no, I'm a little prejudiced against those people. Come on.

0:18:06 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Mm-huh.

0:18:20 Lindsey: Yeah. Same, yeah. It's pretty awesome. Um.

0:18:23 Thomas: Well, that's, does that, I mean, what you just said sounds like it makes this entire thing worthless. Does it make this entire things worthless? Or is there still something to be gained from this study?

0:18:30 Lindsey: Like I Maybe. I don't know, we'll see. I, I think it's still worth talking about it, but

0:18:40 Thomas: It's pretty hard. We're doing all this serious conversation about, yeah, atheists could have bias-y shortcomings. Okay, here's the two groups. Ted Bundy and Pol Pot, are they, how do they feel about those groups? And you're like, well, well, that doesn't, how does that tell me anything? That doesn't tell me anything.

0:18:40 Lindsey: Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, actually I know. So, so I should add, so they measure prejudice against these two groups, but they also measure prejudice against just religious outgroups. So that's worth saying, right? Okay. But yeah, I mean, the way that they're justifying the prejudice against religious fundamentalists and anti-gay activists particularly is by saying like, you know, there's rigidity and there's, you know, ideology behind lack of belief. So, that's how they're setting that up.

0:19:03 Thomas: Okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, apparently.

0:19:20 Lindsey: And so then their final theoretical argument, and this is where they bring in the part about religious outgroups, is that people who don't believe in God share a group identity with other non-believers, which you said a few minutes ago, and thus they may display sort of typical in-group favoritism and out-group derogation toward religious out-groups, right? And so I'm sure that those terms are self-explanatory, but that refers to the social psych concept, this observation that people often report more positive valuations of their in-group members relative to out-groups.

0:19:48 Thomas: Sure, yep.

0:19:49 Lindsey: And so like, yeah, it's possible that if non-believers share an identity group, which they might, especially if they live in very highly religious areas where their non- belief is very salient all the time, that they might display in- group favoritism. Totally possible, right? But then they say, we thus investigated whether people who self-identify as non- nonbelievers would express prejudice toward mere religionists, such as Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. And they go on to say that if nonreligious people show prejudice toward these groups, that this is evidence against them being less rigid and more open, like past literature has claimed, and evidence that they show the same in-group, out-group biases as everyone else, right? I don't know. There's a few things here, but like, I guess the main thing I'll say for now, and we'll come back to this at the end of the study, this study doesn't actually measure their variables in a way that would allow them to look at in-group favoritism.

0:20:24 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, really?

0:20:42 Lindsey: Yeah, so they can, they compare a relative liking of different out-groups here, and you could maybe learn something from that, but they don't measure attitudes toward the in-group, at least they don't for atheists or agnostics. And you kind of need to know that if you want to make a claim about people's attitudes toward out-groups relative to their own in-groups, which is kind of what they're doing here.

0:21:01 Thomas: Interesting. So it could be the case that hypothetically atheists just don't like anybody, like even other atheists. But you didn't measure the comparison in there, yeah, okay.

0:21:08 Lindsey: It could, right? And you wouldn't, you wouldn' t know the difference. Yeah.

0:21:12 Lindsey: And so they're, they're going to interpret the the data that they have here as evidence of prejudice, but like, it's, yeah, it's a little hard to make that claim if you don't have that comparison. Um, so yeah, we'll come back to that at end because I've got a little, uh, extra tidbit to tell you about recording that, um, okay.

0:21:27 Thomas: I love extra tidbits.

0:21:28 Lindsey: I know, it's the best. So, so toward the end, end of their introduction, they start talking about how they're operationalizing or measuring their primary variables. And so first they talk about a suite of measures that they think capture different facets of closed mindedness and rigidity, which they think the atheists are going to be higher on, So right? The first thing that they measure, that they say will indicate sort of a closed mindedness is anti religious critique. And so I'll quote here, anti religious critique is quote, deconsideration of religion as being fully problematic for rationality, individual autonomy and societal progress.

0:21:28 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:22:04 Thomas: So you're just racist against conservatives, pretty much, that okay, yeah.

0:22:06 Lindsey: Exactly. Yeah. And And so they expect the anti-religious critique to predict prejudice toward even, quote, mere religionists, so just, you know, Christians or Muslims or whatever. But the content of the scales is a little important here, so we'll come back to that in methods. Second thing they measure that they say is relevant to measuring close-mindedness is called existential quest, which is, quote. Valuing doubt and showing readiness to question one's own beliefs and attitudes. And they think that atheists are going to be lower on this, right?

0:22:38 Thomas: You would think that would be precisely not what they're low on, but okay.

0:22:39 Lindsey: Yeah. Well, that's what I would think. But no, no, they think, I think, yeah, so specifically, exactly,

0:22:49 Thomas: That's got to be some of that bias coming in where you're like, well, the reason they're, are atheists, is because they don't question their own beliefs.

0:22:56 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, because they're also going to look at people who self-identify as agnostics in addition to atheists. And so they think the atheists are going to look worse in that comparison.

0:23:03 Thomas: Gosh, I don't know. I would think it would be kind of similar, but who knows?

0:23:06 Lindsey: I would Think that too. That would be my prediction a priori. If there's a difference, I think it would probably be pretty small. Because a lot of the atheists I know actually identify as agnostic atheists, by which they mean like, yeah, no, sure. I'd be open to something that was incontrovertible evidence of these things I don't believe in. I just really think the probability is very low that I'm going to see that.

0:23:29 Thomas: Yeah. I think so too. I think it's just funny to think that atheists are the closed minded ones. You know, it could be, but also I, you look, look, everybody is closed minded or at least, you know, wide swaths of society are closed minded in certain ways. Um, but like there, if anything, just Just being like, all right, I don't think there's a magical sky god. You don't have to be too dogmatic and close-minded to other views to just be like, at a minimum, I don't believe that.

0:24:00 Thomas: Hardly needed to be said, but I guess I said it.

0:23:56 Lindsey: Nope, I agree, but that's important to say. Yeah, um, yeah. And so then the the last thing they talk about here that's related to closed-mindedness is something called belief and benevolence. So this is the belief that the that in general the world is good and people are good, and so they they suggest that well, that is consistent with their prediction. They think the atheists are going to be low in this belief and that that might at least partially account for any elevated prejudice that they show toward conservative or religious outgroups.

0:24:16 Thomas: I'm a zero on all that. Okay. Yeah.

0:24:31 Thomas: Does that assume that because conservative religious outgroups control the world kind of thing?

0:24:37 Lindsey: I guess, you know, there's some of these links that I think were a little bit loose in terms of how they made them, right? But yeah, I think that that's the idea is that if you don't believe that the world is benevolent, if you think it's bad, right, that shows like an interpersonal or social closed mindedness. And so, you know, salient outgroupes are going to be more discriminated it against. Well,

0:24:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:56 Thomas: What? I Don't think I follow that. Why would that show like the world first off? The world does suck, we're gonna die of climate change. Why does that mean I'm whatever you just said? Oh,

0:25:05 Lindsey: Yeah. I think, um, I think you could make the case that, um, I don't, I don't know a lot about the literature that has been done to look at this particular construct, the scale that they're they're using, um, but I think it's it's not, um, inconceivable that if you see other people as like fundamentally bad, that that indicates like a social closed-mindedness. Yeah.

0:25:28 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. No, that that makes sense when you put when you phrase it that way. I, I think before it was like that people aren't good and I latch on to that. I don't think that people are like good, every, I don't have that fundamental belief, oh, everybody's actually good. But I don't, I also don't think everybody's actually bad. I just think think that you know humans are humans, and so I think that's why I reacted that way at first, but when you put it that way, yeah, I could see that that's a classic, like, you know, the guy who thinks everybody's out to screw him over, and so he screws everybody else over kind of mindset. I definitely don't have that at all.

0:25:47 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Like That, that cynicism, right? Yeah. And I think this, we'll get to a couple of example items. You probably are going to have approximately that reaction to it. Like this, this scale seems to be like the polar opposite of another one called belief in a dangerous world. Like some of items are like those flipped. And there is this sort of like cynicism about humanity that's kind of reflected in that scale. So yeah. Right. So this is the end of their introduction. They say, in sum, we expected atheists compared to agnostics to show lower cognitive, moral, and interpersonal flexibility and stronger or more extended prejudicial and discriminatory attitudes toward moral and religious outgroups, but not an ethnic outgroup.

0:26:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Okay.

0:26:40 Thomas: When you said lower, I wasn't sure for a second if they mean lower than religious people, but no. No, they mean like when when the subject is a Christian, they're going to show a lower such and such than if the subject is, you know, not a Christian. Is that what they mean?

0:26:53 Lindsey: Wait, run that past me again.

0:26:55 Thomas: Why are you run years past me? I thought so. It's they're Are they comparing atheists to Christians right now? Or are they comparing atheist to atheist in terms of the groups that they're focused on? So they're saying like, when we ask a question about a Christian, then, you know what I mean?

0:26:58 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:27:14 Lindsey: Oh, I see what you're asking. Yeah,

0:27:16 Thomas: Hopefully that was clear.

0:27:16 Lindsey: Yeah. So let me just not read that quote quote, because I think it'll be clearer to paraphrase it. So they are going to do comparisons between atheists, Christians, and agnostics, like people who self-identify as being atheist, Christian, or agnostic, in terms of dimensions that they're saying are indicative of close-mindedness or flexibility, right? They're also going to compare atheist to atheist in terms of how they rate certain outgroups, if that's what you were getting at with the last part

0:27:21 Thomas: Okay. Oh, okay.

0:27:44 Thomas: That is, that is what I was getting. So the, can you say again what that, prediction was that they were saying?

0:27:44 Lindsey: Yes so they they think that uh the atheists in particular are going to be less cognitively flexible um less morally flexible

0:27:59 Thomas: Okay. So that right there, that right There, my first thought was like, well, that's bananas if you're comparing us to Christians. But then I thought, I caught myself and I thought Oh, that's probably going to be a comparison of us to us Just when we're talking about a Christian versus about somebody else It's the first thing They think, Well, okay. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. That's why I did a little tap dance and reversed myself. Because I thought, you know what, no one could possibly think this. But they do. So they think we are going to become more rigid. And the other things you said

0:28:00 Lindsey: No it's it's the first thing yeah yeah the so the the prediction here is a little bit complicated in terms of the groups right so they think they think that agnostics are going to be more open-minded and stuff than atheists are because because they're less certain of their beliefs, and less rigid. Make the comparisons between atheists, agnostics, and Christians, right? But it seems like a lot of their claims are more about, you know, atheists being more close minded than agnosticks, than like, that they're necessarily less close minded Than Christians, I think that they're expecting symmetry between atheism, Christians and some of these dimensions.

0:28:35 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:29:03 Thomas: That's oh okay so it's like you're just as bad as us

0:29:07 Lindsey: Yeah, right. Like, that seems to to be where they're going in this introduction. Like, atheists are religious is essentially, I think, the core of what they're saying. Yeah. That's what they were expecting. So they did a study with a pretty good number of participants. So they've got 1,158 participants. They've got a nice age range, so 18 to 74 years old. And they drew their samples online from three different countries. So they've got a sample from the UK, a sample from France, and a sample from Spain. The way that they drew these samples was a little bit unclear. They didn't give a lot of detail, but they used apparently like Prolific Academic, which is a it's a way to collect data online that I've used before. It's a great platform. But then also there's they said that they recruited from like social media and stuff. It's not clear how they did that, but you know, we can leave that to to the side, I suppose. Then the Spain sample actually was college students. So the UK and France were these online samples, but the Spain was actually college students, probably.

0:29:07 Thomas: Oh yeah okay okay I are the do these people teach at a college in Spain or something is is that why

0:30:07 Lindsey: Yeah, so the third author on the study teaches at a university in Spain. And so, that's a convenient sample for sure. So there's a good representation of atheists, Christians, and agnostics across cross these three samples. Um, so they've got 378 atheists, 375 Christians and 246 agnostics.

0:30:14 Thomas: Okay.

0:30:25 Thomas: You know what I just noticed of the three Headliner, uh, authors here, the guy in Spain is the only university that's not a Catholic university, so maybe that's why they did that sample, to not try to like bias the, you know what I mean, like maybe that's just a university, I don't know, but like, it's just a guess, the other two are like the Catholic University of, and whatever.

0:30:25 Lindsey: Um, yeah, yeah.

0:30:46 Lindsey: That's an interesting note. Um. Cause it is actually, cause actually what they're, what they assess, prejudice uh, toward is not Christians in general. They, they assess prejudice toward Catholics as a, as a representative of, of, uh.

0:30:48 Thomas: Be nothing, just just pointing it out, hmm. Makes sense Okay.

0:30:59 Lindsey: Christianity. So yeah, that's an interesting detail, that's their sample. Pretty good. Here are their measures. So they've got a few things, again, that we've already previewed, that are supposed to tap into sort of this rigidity and closed-mindedness. One thing that we haven't discussed yet is that they use two moral dilemmas to tap what they are calling truth slash rationality oriented deontology, here are the two moral dilemmas, so the way that they describe the first one in the paper is that participants were given a choice between, quote, telling the truth and not putting a friend's life at risk, and and then they, yeah and they

0:31:32 Thomas: Is that like the old Kantian thing with the Nazi at the door, and then you can't, what

0:31:34 Lindsey: Yeah yeah, um it Well, that's, that's how they made it sound, but then, like, so they said that they pulled this from another study, so I went and tracked down the other study. So So I could read the original text of the moral dilemma. And it's not what they're saying at all. It's like your friend is on his deathbed and he, you know, he worked on this company his whole life, and he built it up, and it's his pride and joy, and he's on his deadbed and he asks you how the company's doing, which his son is now running. And you have the choice of either lying, you know, comforting your dying friend by lying or maintaining a commitment to telling the truth,

0:31:49 Thomas: Okay well of course you lie to him duh maintain a commitment to telling the truth, okay you would obviously lie

0:32:15 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's do you tell the truth or lie?

0:32:18 Thomas: To that person on their deathbed? Well, you're, you're, I, I'm gonna, gonna go ahead and say you're a bad person if you don't just say like, yeah, no, doing great, doing great, champ, companies it's, yeah, worth a zillion dollars now, he's dying I would hope so, I'm, now I'm worried about what you're gonna tell me the results are, or really?

0:32:27 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Yeah, I'm guessing that overwhelmingly that's the decision, right? Well, no, But let me tell you what the second dilemma is, because they combine these into one measure, and it makes it impossible to determine how people answered on the individual ones. So here's the second dilemma. You're at a family dinner and somebody mentions that they believe in ghosts.

0:32:43 Thomas: Oh

0:32:52 Lindsey: So do you telling them it's not ghosts? Or do you not say that and maintain a heart?

0:32:52 Thomas: This is perfect you cannot combine these two fucking questions, you dummies, that's these are very different things, one should be a 99.8 yes, you lie to the dying man about his stupid fucking company in his inept son or whatever, that's a, that should be 100, he's on his deathbed, the answer of deathbed is like, just, whatever, they're about to die, just comfort them, uh, but the other one is like, do, that's a very intricate question that depends on a lot of variables, I think. That's weird to combine those two things, don't you think?

0:33:03 Lindsey: And these are...

0:33:13 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, no, I do. And also, so they, again, they combine these two things into one variable, right? So the options are coded as pro-social, right, like lying and being pro-social, or telling the truth and being, quote, non-pro-social deontological in favor of truth slash rationality, and so participants got one point for each deontological decision that they made, and so you could have a score between zero and two, and so they give you summary, very summary, results of this that, like, don't tell you whether anybody chose to tell the truth to the dying friend, like, based on their numbers, we'll come back to it, but based on the numbers, it's entirely possible that zero people in this study said that that was

0:33:50 Thomas: Huh, well, really? There's no, you can't tell that there are twos?

0:34:09 Lindsey: Okay yeah you can't, they all, they give you as a mean for the, for the groups, and the mean does not ever exceed one, yeah, so let

0:34:19 Thomas: Plus, for all I know, like if they're asking Christians too, I mean, don'T they maybe believe in ghosts, depending?

0:34:26 Thomas: What's the phrasing of that question? Like, is it like, premise, there aren't ghosts, so

0:34:32 Lindsey: Let me, let me look, I can bring up that, because they don't describe it all that well, um, it was very difficult, I was hoping that came from another studio the first one was, the one about the dying friend was, but this one they just made up, so they say, quote, the second, second dilemma, in the context of a big annual family dinner, concerned expressing one's own position and criticizing another person's endorsement of paranormal beliefs in the existence of ghosts as irrational and false, or saying nothing to preserve a pleasant family atmosphere.

0:34:37 Thomas: Were you saying this was from another study, okay gotcha Isn't, there's just way too much in that question, you know, like yeah it doesn't, for, for one, what if you are the type of family that's like kind of open and like, like, you know, people disagree openly and it's not a big deal.

0:35:03 Lindsey: It does assume a lot, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have literally done this at a dinner.

0:35:15 Thomas: You this like this shows the bias of religious people, I think, who are like, well, you can never contradict someone's dumb shit belief at a thing because that'll ruin dinner. But like maybe you come from a family that's like, no, you could just be like, yeah, that's bullshit. Nobody cares. You know? It's not big deal, doesn't that? I'm just saying there could be a lot of different circumstances in this and this doesn't like, you now.

0:35:37 Lindsey: Yeah, it doesn't allow for that. So I don't know. It was funny, though. I like the way that they're, I like that they are describing this as like, these are our measures of whether you have a truth slash rationality oriented deontology.

0:35:39 Thomas: Yeah. It is funny. Yeah. Right.

0:35:51 Lindsey: It's like, okay, that's, mm-hmm.

0:35:52 Thomas: I would score a one on this because I would obviously not fucking ruin a dying man's final moments because what kind of asshole monster? It should have been just that question. And if anybody scored one, then you're like, all right, yeah, that's kind of a truth. Like, that is kind of an asshole. Like, you know, if there's atheists who are like, no, you got to tell them because, you know, that'd be like, alright, well, you're an asshole atheist. That's not a nice thing to do.

0:36:14 Lindsey: I think that people have literally asked Sam Harris this dilemma. I think I've heard him talk about this and be like, well, maybe I'm not the person that you want at the bedside of your dying family members. Don't. All right. So that's deontologie for you. Um, the then they describe the existential quest, uh, questionnaire. So again, this is measuring flexibility in existential beliefs and worldviews, um, and valuing doubt, of being open to questioning. And so a couple of example items here are, quote, "In my opinion, doubt is an important is important in existential questions," like, yeah. Um, and then the second example item is, quote, "My way of seeing the world is certainly going to change again." I think I would probably score relatively highly on the the scale based on those two items. Um, I mean, they're non-specific enough about the issues. Like, if you, if you framed all of these about a specific God belief, I would probably look pretty low. Um, but in, in general, yeah, sure.

0:36:18 Thomas: Really? Oh. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

0:37:07 Lindsey: Um, so then the belief in benevolence scale, two example items here are, quote, "There is more good than evil in the world," and the second example is, "Human nature is basically good," that's the belief in benevolence scale. So I don't know. I probably wouldn't max this out, but I'd probably be above the midpoint. I don't know about you.

0:37:17 Thomas: Oh, that's what we're talking about earlier. I Okay. I Don't. Sorry, you're gonna max this out? What's the thing, you're answering the

0:37:27 Lindsey: No, no. No, I think I'd be like probably slightly above the midpoint on this. There would be some things that I would more agree with than disagree, but I think it'd be close to the middle on most of these things.

0:37:37 Thomas: Using the good and evil already is tough. Like, that this is tough terms to use with an atheist poll, you know? Isn't this kind of complicating things?

0:37:44 Lindsey: That's fair. I think I would try to interpret it in the spirit in which it is meant.

0:37:50 Thomas: Well, I know you would, I'm just saying, if you were going to poll atheists, would you maybe, and you're trying to get good data here, you Know, like, would, you maybe word it in ways that aren't spiritually laden, possibly?

0:37:54 Lindsey: Yeah, that That could be a, a good, a good thing to do, right? I could I could see that influencing some people's scores, yeah.

0:38:07 Thomas: Not that, I mean, not that I'm making the claim that there's, you know. Like, you people, I use the terms good and evil sometimes, maybe, you Now, not to make make the claim that you can't as an atheist, but like a lot of atheists are going to be like, I don't even know, you what do you consider good or evil? I don't know.

0:38:15 Lindsey: I think, I think, I don't know, I think the colloquial usage of these terms is, I don't, I could see, I could, some atheist reading this and having the reaction you're talking about. I doubt it's a huge issue, but

0:38:30 Thomas: Yeah. No, that' all I mean. Well, I don't' know, don' tyou think? Like, when you say, okay, can you read the questions again? Sorry. The good and evil ones. More

0:38:31 Lindsey: Yeah, so the first one is, "There is more good than evil in the world," and the second one is human nature is basically good.

0:38:41 Thomas: Good than evil in the world. How do you answer either of those? I have absolutely no idea good

0:38:46 Lindsey: Think, in my mind, I think in my mind, I'm replacing the word evil here with bad. And I'm thinking about that in something like consequentialist terms or motives or something like that.

0:38:50 Thomas: Sure. I think if it's like, are you asking about the score, the humanity score on whether or not there are more good people than bad people? I guess there's more good people. But if you're talking about outcomes, like good versus evil outcomes in the world, I'm not convinced that, I think they're really bad, largely really bad outcomes in the world, and I might answer that way if I was thinking that. You know, okay.

0:39:20 Lindsey: Oh, no, I mean, that's good point. So this scale has two types of items. And one is more describing people specifically, and others are describing the world specifically. They didn't break out those two dimensions, but I expect that you could, and that you would probably find that there's two distinct sort of patterns of responding between those two types. All right. And then so now we're to the prejudice measures. So they're assessing prejudice against six different groups. So religious fundamentalists, anti-gay activists, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists and Chinese people.

0:39:29 Thomas: Hmm. Okay.

0:39:55 Thomas: Just Chinese people.

0:39:56 Lindsey: Yeah. They wanted a comparison of an ethnic outgroup. Yeah, that they could compare to these other things. Yeah, that's an interesting choice. And here's how they're assessing prejudice. So they're using items taken from something called a social distance scale. And so the way these usually work is that you have like a particular target, let's say Chinese people, and then you have people rate like how willing they would be or how much they would like to have a member of that group as a number of different sort of social roles or social arrangements. So they chose three for this study. So they asked how likely or how much they would want to have a member of those different groups as a neighbor, a political representative, or a spouse. And they're taking the ratings on those three things and combining them in their measure of prejudice, right?

0:39:56 Thomas: Oh. Okay. Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

0:40:43 Lindsey: Now, so these are measured. These are used commonly, these social distance items, as measures of prejudice. Usually they include more sort of roles in there. So like they'll include friend, co-worker, things like that. And I think that when it comes to some of these explicitly held beliefs, the meaning of this is going to be a little bit problematic. Problematic, like I'm imagining how I would respond to this. I would think about the question differently if I put Chinese people, neighbor, political representative, spouse, and it's like, okay, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't mean anything to me, it doesn't tell me anything. But if, if you ask me if I want an anti-gay activist as a neighbor, political representative, or Or spouse? Yeah, exactly. Right, it's like, yeah, you'll probably

0:41:16 Thomas: Yeah. As my wife, yeah. I was just gonna say the same thing about like Muslim, Christians, like, I'm not gonna marry a religious person, but let that, but if Someone saw my answer like, "Thomas would never marry a Muslim." He's an anti, you know, like, I don't know. I'd be a little nervous about selecting that, selectively sharing that tidbit. You know what I mean?

0:41:28 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And And it's like, I don't know, like, is that actually prejudice, or are we talking about something like anticipating conflict over shared beliefs if we're talking about like a spousal relationship?

0:41:58 Thomas: Yeah. Well, it's a spousal relationship. Exactly. But as a neighbor, I'dbe like, oh, fine. Don't care. You know, yeah, of course. I love Ilhan Omar. She can be my political representative if I were in Minnesota or whatever. Like, yeah. So I feel like the spouse thing is an interesting part of it. There's a lot that goes into marrying someone and you want to have common interests, whatever.

0:42:01 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:18 Thomas: And actually, I know a lot of people, including one Seth Andrews, is married to a Christian. And it's like, I'm not saying it can't be done or anything. I'm just saying for me, it would be like, it'd be a low probability that I'm going to be marrying a Christian if I were not already married.

0:42:27 Lindsey: I wouldn't be able to do it. Yeah, exactly. Right. So I don't know. It seems like a weird set of choices here. Political representative, too, I think is a little bit loaded when it comes, especially to like the anti-gay activists. It's like, OK, do you want people to pass discriminatory laws?

0:42:45 Thomas: Oh, God, no. Look, we should be proudly discriminatory toward anti-gay activists. I don't want them as a neighbor. I don't want them as a spouse. I don't want them in politics. Are you kidding me? That's just like, I accept very well. I accept if your measure of me being intolerant is that I'm intolerant toward anti-gay activists. I don't give a shit. That's fine.

0:42:46 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah no I own that as well.

0:43:06 Thomas: I was more worried about the actual, like, well, you know, Muslims, Christians, they yell people that it might, I might actually be worried about their feelings. I'm not worried about an anti-geo activist feelings.

0:43:16 Lindsey: No, nor am I. Yeah yeah so it's I don't know this this collection of things to measure prejudice seemed I had a few problems with it. I'm sure it'll tell you something, but like, I don't know. I feel like there's some problems here. So they used those three social distance item. And then they had a fourth item that they also folded into their sort of composite measure of prejudice, which was a feeling thermometer. And this essentially is like a liquored item. So you have a scale from zero, which represents like completely cold and unfavorable, to 100, which represents completely warm and favorable. And participants are just rating how they feel about each group. Group. So they standardized, you know, the scores on all of those and they just created a mean from those and that's their measure of prejudice. Right. And then the last thing, they measured anti-religious critique and religiosity.

0:44:03 Lindsey: So, they have this five-item external critique scale from the post-critical belief scale that they used to measure anti- religious critique. And so, I'm just going to read off these items real quick. So faith turns out to be an illusion when one is is confronted with the harshness of life. The world of Bible stories is so far removed from us that it has little relevance. Science has made a religious understanding of life superfluous. And yeah, and in the end, faith, or actually there's two more. In the end faith is nothing more than a safety net for human fears. And finally, faith is an expression of a weak personality.

0:44:40 Thomas: This is just measuring atheism.

0:44:42 Lindsey: Yeah, kind of, right? I mean, there's a couple of these items I think that I'd be a little bit bit lower on, but my overall score on the scale would be pretty high

0:44:46 Thomas: Yeah, I think I'd be pretty low on the faith as a measure of a weak personality, I think that's an asshole atheist view that probably a lot of people think in the atheism community, and they shouldn't. Like, I don't, come on, it's not a sign of a week personality, okay.

0:44:49 Lindsey: Yeah that's yeah no That one stood out to me too, and interestingly that is the item that they give as the example for this scale in the article. They don't give the rest of them, and

0:45:08 Thomas: Yeah the rest of them are totally like, mostly fine. There's the one, it's like, I don't think science has made a religious worldview, what is it, irrelevant or something, superfluous yeah, I don't really think that's true, I think that's a pretty, but I also think that's a good scale item. I'd be interested in those two scale items to measure like actual asshole atheists. You know, like there's a, within this study, it sounds like there could be a study of like, all right, what percentage of atheists are assholes? And I have no problem with that study. Like that, like any group of people in the world, there's going to be a percentage that are like, yeah, I don't want to have a Muslim neighbor. And you're like, well, then you're an asshole.

0:45:16 Lindsey: Superfluous yeah

0:45:45 Thomas: That's kind of an asshole thing. I have no problem saying that, but mixing those together. Other. Cause some of the other ones were like, no, obviously. What?

0:45:30 Lindsey: Yeah yeah uh Bible stories, they're so far removed from us that it has a little relevance, like yeah, yeah yeah, but the reason I thought it was interesting that they, they left, that the only one they provided in the paper was faith is an expression of a weak personality, is because that's one of the more asshole statements in the scale, and so it gives you the impression that like all of the scale items, that this is representative of all the scale items, and so like I was like, okay well that's it's A little misleading, I think, um, so that's their anti-religious critique variable and then they also computed a religiosity index from three, three items assessing how important God was to the participants, the importance of religion in their life, and frequency of prayer. And that's pretty standard measure of religiosity. So finally results, so first of all, they did find, surprise, surprise, that atheists and agnostics were higher than Christians on that anti-religious critique scale. Duh, right?

0:45:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That's a hundred percent. Yes. Proudly. Yes. To that. Yeah, yeah. It seems misleading to me.

0:46:47 Thomas: Okay, that's

0:46:48 Lindsey: But actually the, the score difference was not as big as you might think. So this was a one to seven scale and across the three samples, atheists had average scores of around five whereas agnostics had scores around 4.5 and christians had scores around 3.5, I was surprised that the Christian average was as high as it was, it's, I would have anticipated them almost like bottoming out that scale, but yeah, I found that interesting. Um, next they found that atheists and agnosticks were more likely than Christians to make a deontological decision in the moral dilemmas, right? But of course they describe it as being, being higher in, quote, "factual slash rational, truth-oriented, rigid, non-prosocial moral deontology." That's

0:46:52 Thomas: Interesting huh that's interesting, yeah yeah yeah

0:47:30 Lindsey: How they describe that finding. But okay, but as we were talking about, right, here are the average numbers. Across the three studies, atheists and agnostics made the deontological decision an average of like 0.8 to 1 out of those two scenarios. So again, that could mean a few different things, right? It's possible that like, you some subset of people answered to like, answered the the truth decision to both of them, and then everybody else did neither of them, but it's also possible that like literally everyone was saying like, no, I'm not gonna lie to my dying friend, and then there was a little bit of variability in terms of, you know, whether people would, uh, would do the ghost thing

0:48:08 Thomas: Well it could be that, you know, nobody did the deathbed one and everybody did the ghost one, right, which would be interesting

0:48:15 Lindsey: Did I say that backwards?

0:48:16 Thomas: I think, think you said that, you know, nobody did the deathbed one and then some people did the other one, but I think if nobody did the deathbed one and your average is what, 0.8 to 1, that means like almost everybody did the other one, right? Mm-hmm.

0:48:26 Lindsey: Well, out of the two scenarios area. So like, but we don't know, right? Like, we don't know which of the one, which of the two decisions people were consistently making. I think it's more likely that people are saying the lie to the dying friend to be kind and won't lie about the ghost thing.

0:48:29 Thomas: Yeah of course yeah so I think it's interesting that it, with how bad that deathbed 1 is, 0.82.1 if that's the numbers we're talking about, seems a little high to me, but I guess that means that atheists are pretty cool with being like, now no, ghosts aren't real.

0:48:56 Lindsey: I think that that's probably what I hope that's what it means. But we don' know.

0:48:59 Thomas: Yeah. Which is like, I mean, okay, you're at a dinner and someone says ghosts. I feel like you can be like, yeah, not ghosts. That doesn't seem like that. Is that that big of an asshole move?

0:49:07 Lindsey: Not ghost. It doesn't feel like it to me. I'm pretty open with people when they start talking about ghosts because it's funny, it's funny to tell them it's not ghosts. But yeah, so that, so the, that was the atheists and agnostics, they had averages between 0.8 and 1 on that 0 to 2 scale. Christians made this decision between 0.6 and 0.08.

0:49:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:30 Thomas: It's not even that different. Is it?

0:49:31 Lindsey: It's not that different, no, it's like, it's, it is a significant difference only in two out of three samples, by the way, so the Spain one was not significant, but like, no, this is not a huge difference, this looks very similar, but whatever, I don't know. So I wouldn't want to over-interpret that finding, but

0:49:44 Thomas: Yeah, I also bet that that has a lot more to do with culture than with atheism per se, because like I know there's I'm always always told as a West Coast person, I'm always told like, well, you know, on the East Coast, they'd just be like, yeah, that's fucking dumb, you dummy, you know, and it's just, and it's not like, not regardless of the religion, not religion thing, and I don't know how much that's true, but that's something I always hear as a West Coast, but like they always say, like in California, people are too scared to do that, you know, which is honestly, it's kind of true, like people are pretty, they don't want to challenge people on these things, and so I don't know if that's true, yeah.

0:49:52 Lindsey: That's a good point. That's very possible.

0:50:09 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, that's true in the South too. Yeah

0:50:20 Thomas: But like that could be more of an influence than just, you you know, whether or not you're an atheist, it could be like, you know how, how much do you feel like expressing yourself in a way that's contradictory to what the group is thinking?

0:50:32 Lindsey: Yeah. No, I agree with that. And at the very least, I think we can we can agree that this is not a very good measure of like rigid moral deontology. Yeah so yeah.

0:50:39 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm not saying it's like a worthless question, but yeah, it just seems like you could have come up with maybe a better question for one. The other one is like so different that I feel like, I don't know, there's gotta be a better way to study this.

0:50:55 Lindsey: Yeah, I wouldn't lump these and they could have, they could have had these as like separate items that they analyzed that would have been interesting to look at but

0:51:00 Thomas: Yeah. I want to see the person who's reverse of what we think, like someone was like, yes tell the dying person No, don't, what if it's someone who's like, well, tell the dying person, they're not, what are they going to do, fight you? They're dying, who cares? You can tell them, but in the group of family dinner, like, yeah, I don't want to, yeah.

0:51:03 Lindsey: It would be polite about ghosts but yeah My dad would kick my ass. Yeah, yeah, well that's interesting, you might have identified a an outlier profile here

0:51:22 Thomas: I know like I as I said it, I was like, that's not, there may be, be a person or two, I don't know, maybe, maybe that could have been a person or two, yeah.

0:51:28 Lindsey: Yeah out Of these, like, 1200 participants, there's probably at least one person who answered that way. Exactly. Okay, so they didn't observe any differences between between atheists, agnostics, and Christians in belief in benevolence in any of the three countries. So across all of these samples, everyone's scores, regardless of religious self-identification, hovered between four and five on this dimension on a one to seven scale. So yeah, yeah,

0:51:37 Thomas: Hmm.

0:51:47 Thomas: Well, that actually makes sense to me because like a lot of religious people are like the world is sin, it fucking sucks, you know, or yeah or maybe religious people would be like, oh, beautiful, beautiful, love, and like, I think that's more of a disposition than a belief thing, possibly, like that's Moreva, like how are you You. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess it could also be true that that psychological disposition could correlate with one thing or the other. But I don't know. I don'T think it does this. All I'm saying is this result makes sense to me. But who knows?

0:52:05 Lindsey: Yeah. It's full of pedophiles. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah, Yeah.

0:52:28 Lindsey: Well, yeah, the group differences do make sense to me. And, you know, that undermines sort of their theoretical claim that atheists are going to be more prejudiced because they believe that the world is, you now, less benevolent or whatever.

0:52:41 Thomas: Oh, absolutely. That was always that was always a stupid claim.

0:52:44 Lindsey: Yeah. But that said, it was true when they looked at correlations that belief of benevolence did exhibit a relationship with prejudice. So people who were higher on this did exhibit less prejudice. It just wasn't associated with you know these yeah

0:52:57 Thomas: Oh, so people in both groups. So it didn't divide out in the groups. Right across

0:53:01 Lindsey: Like being agnostic, atheist, christian didn't predict this at all at the group level, but like across all groups, yeah, there was a correlation that like people in general who believed in a benevolent world showed less prejudice so

0:53:07 Thomas: All groups. Right. Gotcha. Gotcha. That's what I was trying to say in bad non-sciencey words. So thank you for rephrasing it. That that's interesting. That makes sense.

0:53:13 Lindsey: Yeah yeah yeah Right, and so like, it, I guess it generally supports their their thought that there would be a link between the belief in benevolence and prejudice, it's just that it doesn't, it doesn't describe atheists apparently um Okay, so atheists and agnostics actually scored significantly higher than christians in existential quest across the three studies, not a huge difference, but it is there, yeah that's that's the one about like thinking that it's important to have doubt and question your beliefs yeah yeah, so they're higher than christian's on that, we we predicted that, yeah apparently um yeah they didn't

0:53:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, remind me with that. Oh, yeah, of course. So were these were these Catholic people who did the study like, oh, what? I wasn't expecting that.

0:53:57 Thomas: No, seriously. Did they write in the discussion section anything about this, okay okay

0:53:58 Lindsey: Um Yeah, no, they, they did discuss this, right Um, they, I, this was counter to their predictions, and also there was that, there was specifically they were predicting that atheists would be lower than agnostics, and they did not find that to be the case, so atheists and yeah Atheists, agnostic looked very similar, um, and they were both higher than christians, right So all right, so now to work to the prejudice, this is the good stuff, so get ready for it, atheists, angnostics did exhibit more prejudice toward anti-gay activists and religious fundamentalists compared to christians, were just as bad, yeah, no problem owning this, absolutely Yes, right, now there was not a consistent difference observed between christians and non-believers on attitudes toward muslims, buddhists, or the chinese, right

0:54:13 Thomas: Where is it like pretty much similar, interesting wow gosh we're just as bad as they are, aren't we, two sides yeah okay

0:54:48 Lindsey: Yeah

0:54:49 Thomas: I was gonna, so I was thinking, I was hoping it'd be similar, or maybe honestly religious people would be more racist against chinese people, but I wasn't sure on the other religions, I could have seen that breaking kind of either way

0:55:02 Lindsey: Well, actually, so there was one study, this was the spain sample, where atheists and agnostics actually showed significantly less prejudice toward chinese people compared to Christians, um, but it was only one study that that showed up in, so that could be a fluke, you, but yeah, no, there, there did not seem to be consistent differences, you there were some things that showed up like only when you compared agnostics to, uh, Christians in like one study, or only when you compared atheists to Christians in one study, but like the differences are are all over the place and they're very small, and usually when you see a pattern like that, it's because there's not really a real effect that's coming through.

So my interpretation, looking at like all the different comparisons they did across all three of these samples, is that no, they have not found a consistent difference here in terms of, you know, quote unquote, prejudice toward Muslims, Buddhists, or the Chinese, right. And I found it pretty interesting that they didn't at least find a small consistent effect in terms of prejudice toward Muslim's among atheists, right, because I could have seen that happening. They only found that in one of the samples, and it was a pretty small difference. So in the UK sample, they found slightly more prejudice among atheists toward Muslims.

0:55:10 Thomas: Yeah

0:56:10 Lindsey: Let

0:56:10 Thomas: Well you're saying more, so that's the part that I'm not sure on, it could be that atheists and christians are both, or whatever, atheists or religious people are both groups that are prejudiced against muslims, right, are we just comparing those two groups, are we comparing, doing some like baseline line comparison.

0:56:28 Lindsey: So atheists showed more prejudice compared to Christians, it was not significantly more prejudice, like, compared to their attitudes toward the other groups that they were surveyed about. The only, the only consistent thing that they found across these samples was that, um, both atheist and agnostics liked catholics less than christians Did, so that was the only significant sort of consistent prejudice, which, like, yeah, dude, I mean, as an institution, I have some pretty negative attitudes toward catholicism right now with all the the child sex abuse and things. Um, all right, so in terms of, so those are the, those are the central findings that they have here, right, um, and in their discussion, they talk about this collection of findings as though they have provided consistent evidence that atheists actually do show clear prejudicial and discriminatory attitudes toward toward these religious outgroups, and toward these sort of anti-liberal groups, right, the anti-gay activists and the Christian fundamentalists. I think they are way overstating that.

0:56:32 Thomas: Huh? Okay. Sure yeah yeah

0:57:26 Lindsey: They have found, like, a couple of inconsistent findings in terms of the religious outgroupes. They HAVE found the thing about anti- gay activists and religious fundamentalists, but, like of course, and fine. And to call this discriminatory is a lot, right? This is not, not discrimination, this is, um, I mean, like, just in a terminology sense, like discrimination means behavior yeah Um, so I, I have a lot of problems with how they're interpreting this, it's it's, uh, it's problem, but, so I know we're almost out of time, but I've just got one little fun coda to follow up on this, in 2021, when this public study was published, another set of researchers, speed Eden Brewster, also published a study that was on almost the same research question.

0:57:34 Thomas: Doy yeah yeah reverse racism lindsey sure really useful

0:58:12 Lindsey: Yeah, so they were looking at in-group favoritism and comparing atheists to theists. And they also do a specific comparison between atheists and Christian theists in terms of, again, how much in-group favoritismo these different groups display toward religious outgroups, so right? They assessed attitudes, attitudes toward atheists, right, and they assessed attitudes toward Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims, right? So the thing that's smart here that they did that the other study did not do is that they are getting measures of people's religious in-groups in addition to these religious out-groupes, and so they can actually look at the difference between how people think about their own in-group members versus the other ones. Yes, it is.

0:58:52 Lindsey: So they can actually look in-grouper favoritism instead of not looking at it and pretending that you did, it like the other article.

0:58:49 Thomas: Makes sense okay

0:58:58 Lindsey: I will tell you. So what they found was that while it did look like atheist ratings of Christians, for instance, were lower than Christians' ratings of Christians. It turned out that this was driven by the fact that Christians showed really high ratings of other Christians. So the Christians in their study rated their attitudes toward other Christians to be about 4.4 on a five point scale. So very, very favorable in other words, But Christians rated all the other groups as significantly lower, with the lowest ratings being for atheists at 2.9 and the highest ratings being toward Jews at 3.8. All of those comparisons were significant, though, indicating that Christians exhibit significant in-group

0:58:58 Thomas: What happened yeah yeah yeah

0:59:37 Lindsey: Favoritism. And by contrast, here's what they found with atheists. Atheists showed approximately the same ratings of all religious groups. And it was a little above the midpoint of the scale. Yeah. So the average rating of other atheists by atheists was about 3.5. And the ratings of other religious outgroups ranged between 3.2, and that was Muslims, and 3.6, and that was Jews. And there were no significant differences between those comparisons. So essentially, because you said something earlier that made me think of this explicitly, that's like, okay, well, for most of these things, it's like, this just doesn't tell me much

0:59:38 Thomas: Huh seems nice and fair that strikes me as very healthy, am I wrong, doesn't that seem like pretty healthy view yeah

1:00:20 Lindsey: About you, right, just to know that you're jewish doesn't really tell me much about you, that's what the, and they're, what the atheist results are reflecting is that they're doing that, but not just without groups, they're doing it with other atheists, are saying the fact this person is atheist doesn't really tell me much, so everybody's around the same

1:00:34 Thomas: And I, I think that in-group preference can be just as dangerous as viewing another group like you might be like, oh, you know, studies may show, you don't have, you know, necessarily negative views about a given race or demographic. But if you heavily favor your own race or demographic, like that's still going to have very bad effects.

1:00:55 Lindsey: That's that's going to create problems Yeah, right, so I think that like these results are are very fun, but they also, they, they do cast the results of this study in a very different light, right? So those few inconsistent findings where they're saying like, well, maybe here atheists are showing more prejudice, unless we have that in-group comparison, it's hard to know exactly what that means, I think.

1:00:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally.

1:01:18 Lindsey: So I just, I was delighted to find this and be able to contrast it.

1:01:20 Thomas: That's honestly, that study, that second study you mentioned makes me feel pretty decent. Like I, yeah. All right. We're a little bit, you you know, a little bit negative on some religious groups, probably because they're, uh, you know ruining the entire country and all that, like that, that could factor in. Although, uh yeah, I, I don't, you didn't mention where the samples were taken from. I don't think in the second one

1:01:35 Lindsey: Oh, the second one was US, actually.

1:01:44 Thomas: U.S. study.

1:01:45 Lindsey: That's that's important.

1:01:45 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. There you go. So yeah. Uh, but you know we rate each other similarly, you know. That, that seems healthy to me. Here's what, here's how we should round it out. I should have come up with this a long time ago. We need a scale. Somebody, uh, listeners, patrons, whoever, give us, give us the name of the scale, you know, um, sort of like put a palp in it, that was good for the for that thing, what's your scale of how bad of a science thingy this is, was this main study we looked at, was it a bad science thingie? Yeah.

1:01:45 Lindsey: Yeah. Oh.

1:02:12 Lindsey: For me, okay.

1:02:13 Thomas: Like, tell me how bad, if we need a Lindsey scale, did, how bad a science, did they do right?

1:02:13 Lindsey: Oh. This yeah This will be a fun one, I mean it's, it's definitely not as bad as the, those other ones we were talking about with the, the political stuff. Um, scale of one to ten, maybe I'd say ten being the most bad science thingy, um, I just yeah I'd say maybe a six or a seven, just because they're, the way they're interpreting their results is completely off base. The methods aren't terrible, aside from those moral dilemmas. Yeah.

1:02:24 Thomas: Oh. Most bets, okay, okay. Interesting. Good. Gotcha, based, I think you presented this very well, because based on your presentation, I, I would have guessed similarly, you know, like it seems like not terrible but kind of like sloppy here and there and not really showing and and Honestly, kind of biased in how they're phrasing everything, which I would expect from Catholics, honestly, because I'm prejudiced against Catholics, reverse racism.

1:02:49 Lindsey: It's sloppy and they're, yeah, they're over interpreting things correct.

1:03:04 Thomas: All right, well, uh, so overall takeaway, uh, atheists are prejudiced against anti-gay activists, and that means we're just as bad as the Nazis. I think, okay, all right.

1:03:14 Lindsey: That is the takeaway. Thank

1:03:18 Thomas: As usual, thanks to the best science person in the business, Lindsey, Dr. Lindsay Osterman, and as usual as well, go to the Patreon Q&A thread if you have any questions about today's show or any of the shows this month, of the two that we've done, it's been a, it's been a weird month, little vacation, a little different stuff, sorry about that, but anyway, I hop on that Q&A thread if you would like to ask questions. And by the way, please support the show on patreon.com/seriouspod and gain access to that question thread and interact with us, it's a lot of fun, and it supports the show, and it shows how much you appreciate the best science person in the business, Dr. Lindsay Osterman. So please do so. All right, Lindsay, thanks so much, we'll

1:03:21 Lindsey: You. And Thank you.

1:03:58 Thomas: See you folks next time

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