Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Angrboda]

The God Effect

At first glimpse, what the New York Times dubbed the God Effect seems to support Prager's proposal. In what is known as the Dictator Game, (S&N hereafter) gave participants ten dollars and told them that they could keep or share as much of it as they wanted with a second player, whom they would never meet. Under such conditions participants keep all or most of the money for themselves, and that is just what S&N's control participants did.

By contrast, S&N primed religious concepts in the minds of participants in their experimental group by having them unscramble short lists of words to produce sentences. The lists included words like "divine" and "prophet," which were used in non-religious senses in the unscrambled sentences -- such as "her dress was divine." The point about such priming procedures is that the effects that they induce are, presumably, unconscious. Crucially, when their participants in the experimental group played the one shot, anonymous Dictator Game, they were significantly more generous than the controls, leaving on average $2.38 more. The religious primes seemed to have elicited greater generosity.

At Second Glimpse, Glimpses Matter

At second glimpse, however, S&N's findings cause as many problems for the view that religion makes people more moral as they provide evidences for it. Although twenty-four of their fifty student participants were non-believers, those atheists and agnostics, like all of S&N's participants, had been assigned to the control and experimental groups randomly. S&N found that these participants were just as susceptible to the unconscious God Effect as religious participants were.

More importantly, though, in a second study S&N provided evidence that the effects on their participants may not have been due to anything uniquely religious. This study was like the first, but S&N incorporated additional checks on their methods. Instead of students, their participants were community members (with fewer atheists), and they were questioned about the experiment afterward. S&N also used the scrambled sentences task to produce neutral primes for their control group and legal primes for a third group. Using words like "civic," "jury," and "contract," the latter condition yielded sentences like "he drives a Civic."

This second study replicated the God Effect, but it also revealed a comparable legal institutions effect. Participants in that third group proved just as generous as those who had had religious concepts primed. The questioning of participants afterward supported the unconscious impact of priming, since seventy-five of seventy-eight participants were unaware of anything connected with religion in the experiment.



Other studies suggest that any conditions that reduce anonymity in such economic games or that even unconsciously cue concerns about reputation generally will engender more moral behavior. A picture of two eyes on the wall, as opposed to a picture of flowers, was, for example, sufficient to significantly increase the payments for drinks in a lounge using the honor system. Religious concepts have what it takes to inspire better conduct, but the eyes have it too.

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I thought the following library of essays might be of general interest to readers of this thread.

Infidels.org: (Modern Library)