I’ll be talking today about popular 
perceptions of atheists.
I think on the schedule it has me listed as popular prejudice against atheists.
You’ll soon see that these are largely 
synonymous titles.
To begin, I want to play a quick game.
Show of hands here, is there anyone in this 
room who does not believe in God?
Show of hands, I won’t tell.
We’ll call that a few of you. Hands down.
All right, now think about those people 
who just raised their hands,
and now raise your hand if you dislike, distrust,
or otherwise find those people morally repugnant.
We’ll count a couple of hands.
So I think I'm going to try to convince you 
that those two games show
at least two ways in which
you are a very strange group of people.
If I were to assemble comparably
sized groups in most places on Earth
and asked those two questions, we’d
find basically the exact opposite pattern,
in terms of when people are raising
their hands.
So I’ll be talking again about negative
perceptions of atheists.
Just to illustrate one way in which this
shows up: Gallup polls.
They typically run polls where 
they try to assess
cultural perceptions of different groups  
of people. So they say,
all right, imagine a well-qualified member of  
your own preferred political party.
Would you vote for them if they also  
happened to be [fill in the blank]?
So you can look
at what percentage of people say yes, I would
vote for this person, and that’s kind of
an index of cultural inclusion or exclusion.
So I’ll show you some recent data on this.
So up here is 100% of people
saying yes, I would vote for that person,
0, 50%. So people overwhelmingly say
sure, I would vote for
a Catholic candidate, or a black candidate, 
or a Mormon candidate,
or a gay candidate, or a Muslim candidate.
I believe these are the data from 2007. They
had one group included that couldn’t reach
that 50% barrier. People said no, I would
not vote for an atheist candidate.
The only group included.
Now from a psychological perspective,
this is a strange form of prejudice.
Ricky Gervais summarizes it quite nicely.
He says that
atheism is a worldview,
much like not going skiing is a hobby.
We know nothing about atheists, other than
one thing that they don’t do. So why is it
that we have such strong opinions about them?
In other words, what’s driving people’s
negative perceptions of atheists?
I’m going to propose that a lot of
people’s negative perceptions of atheists
really boils down to intuitions
about morality and whether morality
is ultimately rooted in religion in some way.
Coming back to Azim's question:
does God make us good?
Do we need religion in order to be moral?
So what is the relationship between
religion and morality?
We can start out by asking
a scientist. You might now be getting
why Azim and I switched positions, because
some scientists would say yes,
maybe there is a causal relationship.
Something about some aspect 
of religion is actually driving
some stuff that we would consider moral.
So for instance, here are those dictator
game studies that Azim was summarizing.
You get people to think about religious
concepts - they become more generous.
Religious people are reporting
that they give more money to charity.
Religion helps people resist temptation. 
It increases self-control.
So, in this sense, something about
religion does seem to be driving morality.
On the other hand, we’d be able to ask
other scientists the same question,
and we might get an answer of
“you know, not really”.
Morality doesn’t just boil down to religious
stuff, which Azim would also agree with.
So for instance, you have the work of Frans de Waal,
a primatologist, who works with
non-human primates.
Our closest primate relatives, chimps
and bonobos, seem to have
the basic core building blocks of morality. 
You see, essentially,
moral judgments in pre-verbal and,
presumably, pre-religious infants.
Some of our core intuitive moral
judgments seem to be rather robust across
variation in religion. So some aspect of religion
might be driving some aspect of morality,
but clearly that’s not the entire story.
Some of the core building blocks are 
already in place without religion.
So our scientist would say
this is a complicated question.
We don’t have all the answers,
but we're working on it.
That’s the nuanced answer.
For the rest of the talk, I'll be seeing well
what happens if instead of asking scientists,
what happens if we asked everyday folks?
What if we assessed lay intuitions of this
relationship between religion and morality?
Specifically, might this be driving people’s 
negative perceptions of atheists?
A lot of people seem to view morality  
as inherently rooted
in religion in this struggle  
between good and evil.
So, a lot of people would say that  
we get our actual moral laws from religion.
Cue Ten Commandments
photo. Above and beyond the actual moral rules,
they say a lot of our motivation to follow
up on those rules comes because we believe
in these supernatural agents that are 
monitoring our behavior.
These gods, It’s not just that they're watching,
but they can actually punish us
when we're not doing what we’re
supposed to be doing.
Potentially, if we’re thinking
about these supernatural agents this will
lead us to change our behavior and not
engage in our basest urges.
That’s a possibility. Is there any truth to the idea
that people might think this way?
Pew has a nice global survey where they ask 
people whether or not they agree with
the rather strongly worded statement,
“It is necessary to believe in God in order
to be moral and have good values”.
Necessary in order to be moral.
Here in the US, 57% of people
tend to agree with that statement.
The US isn’t necessarily an outlier on this.
So you’ll see, for instance, in a lot of Europe,
people are saying well no, of course
you can be moral without belief in God.
In most of the rest of the world, most
people are agreeing with that statement.
This leads to some predictions, and I’m
going to focus on this one.
If people are viewing religion as a necessary
component of morality,
then they should intuitively assume
that atheists are capable of engaging
in immoral behavior.
If religion is driving morality,
atheists don’t have the religion,
what’s going to give them morality?
I’m going to walk through
the general methods that I’ll be using
from a bunch of studies that I’m
going to talk about. I’m also doing Bastiaan
a favor, because he’s using
the exact same methods.
The general task comes from
Kahneman & Tversky.
It’s the conunction fallacy task.
Here’s how it works.
So here's their classic example. 
Here’s Linda. Linda is 31 years old,
single, outspoken, and very bright.
She majored in philosophy.
As a student, she was deeply concerned 
with issues of discrimination and social justice,
and also participated in 
anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable,
A) Linda is a bank teller or B)
Linda is a bank teller who is active in the
feminist movement? You have to pick one.
Typically, most people pick option B,
even though logically it cannot be true.
Feminist bank teller is merely a
subset of bank tellers in general.
So what’s going on? Is it just that
 people are stupid and that's why most people
can’t get this elementary 
probability question right?
It doesn’t seem to be that. The way the
question is phrased, we get a description
of Linda, and then option B implies a potential
target group membership.
In this case, the description intuitively
matches up
with that target group membership,
so there’s this intuitive pull to pick option B
rather than option A, 
just because the two fit together.
But it’s pretty easy to break this effect.
You can independently manipulate either the
contents of the description or the target
group membership. If they don’t match up,
all of a sudden people don’t want to pick
option B. For instance, if I gave you that
exact same description of Linda and then I said,
which is more probable,
A) She’s a bank teller or B) She’s a bank teller and
an avid big game hunter,
you might be less intuitively inclined
to pick option B.
I use this example in talks and a paper,
and one reviewer finally said,
well run that study — how do you
know people wouldn'’t pick option B?
Zero percent of people pick option B if it’s
a big game hunter.
So you break the effect if the description 
doesn’t match the implied target.
We thought with Azim and Ara back in 2011, we can use this task to assess the
degree to which people intuitively assume
that certain descriptions fit certain groups.
We came up with an example of an untrustworthy
person. So we had Richard. On his way to work,
he backed his car into his neighbor’s
van. He got out and some people were looking,
so he pretended to write down his contact
information, and then he tucked this in the
van and left. Later in the same day, he’s
walking and sees a wallet on the ground.
Nobody's looking, so he takes the money
out of the wallet
and throws the wallet in the trashcan. 
Not a nice guy.
So then you would do this conjunction fallacy
task: which is more probable?
A) Richard is a teacher 
B) Richard is a teacher and—
and then we plug in different groups
 to see which ones cue this effect.
To orient you, I’m going to have
different groups of people down here.
Here’s the percentage of people who pick
option B.
Big bar means people are intuitively 
saying this group fits that description.
For most groups we tried, we didn’t 
really elicit the effect.
People given that description
weren’t think this person’s gay,
or this person’s a Christian, or this person’s
a Muslim, or this person’s a feminist.
But lots of people, given that description, jumped
to the conclusion
that this person is probably an atheist.
You might asking, all right that’s
40/50%; how big is this bar? We only found
one group that scored comparably to atheists
on this indirect measure of distrust,
and this was rapists.
Take that how you will.
That was one example looking at 
intuitive distrust,
but recently I wanted to expand
this to look at issues of morality more broadly.
Azim already nicely summarized some the moral
foundations work. This is the idea that
there are 5, maybe he's adding a 6th one, 
but these different categories
of moral judgments. For instance, harm. We
don’t like it if you hurt others for fun.
Issues of fairness—stealing’s no good.
Loyalty to your in-group, respect for authority,
or there are also purity concerns. If you’re
familiar with moral foundations theory,
you'll know why there’s a chicken there. If not,
you’ll find out soon.
Across these studies, I wanted to give people descriptions of people violating
each of these categories of morality,
and then see if they intuitively assume that
the perpetrator is an atheist,
rather than somebody who belongs to 
some other group.
Some people gotta “harm” example. 
So somebody's sitting on the bus
on their way home from work.
An obese woman gets on the bus, and rather
than give up his seat, this person decides
to ridicule the woman about her appearance.
Then he gets off the bus and he’s walking home,
and a stray dog runs up
so he kicks it in the head really hard. 
So this is a violation of harm.
For fairness, we had somebody who essentially 
isn't a good friend or neighbor.
Somebody helps him move into a new apartment, 
and then when she asks him for help,
he blows her off.
He also likes to go to the bar to play poker,
and if he’s playing with people he doesn't
know, he cheats in order to take their money.
For violations of loyalty, we
have the example of Leslie, who is an American.
She’s travelling in Europe and she pretends
to be Canadian. She roots against the American
Olympic team that year. This causes some friction
with her family, so she cuts off all ties
with her family for a year. So she’s turning
against family and country.
For violation of authority,
we have the story of Drew.
She doesn't like her boss, so one day
her boss is walking away and she flips him off.
She’s walking home from work that day.
 Some police are setting up a barricade
for a parade the next day, and they 
politely ask her to find a different way home.
She tells them to go fuck themselves,
and she walks through the barricade anyway.
Finally for purity, we have a classic example
from Jonathan Haidt, where we have the story
of Catherine who’s working in a medical
school pathology lab.
They've finished working with this cadaver and it’s going to be cremated the next day.
She thinks to herself, what a tremendous waste of perfectly edible meat.
She cuts off some flesh from this person and goes home and cooks it and eats it.
So people would get one of
these descriptions of a moral violation.
Then they get the conjunction task:
which is more probable? A) This person is a teacher
B) This person is a teacher and — some
of them get a potential atheist target,
some of them get a potential gay target.
Let’s see which of these moral violations
 seem to fit with either the atheist or gay target.
It turns out that people 
are intuitively viewing atheists
as potential puppy-kicking, poker-cheating,
Canadian-feigning, scoff-law, cannibals.
For each potential moral violation, people are
intuitively making the leap that this person
might be an atheist. So that’s some support
for this general prediction. I want to consider
other potential groups to compare to. Atheists
vs. Gays is a nice comparison, but it would
be good to broaden the search a bit
and also consider other types of moral violations.
I had one study where I decided to look at
consensual incest.
This is another Jonathan Haidt example 
where you have a brother and sister
backpacking through Europe, and one night 
they decide to have sex with each other.
They use multiple forms of birth control, 
they never tell anyone.
Nonetheless, a lot of people kind of have 
the gut reaction that this is not right.
We give people the description
of consensual incest, then we do the conjunction task.
This time I wanted to compare across
different potential religious identities to
see if it’s an atheist thing or just a religious
out-group thing. It turns out nobody seems
to think that members of these various religious
groups are likely to engage in incest,
but again, atheists are probably into that.
Now we get the chicken example, 
this one again from Jonathan Haidt,
the story of Jack. He’s on his way
home from work and he stops at a butcher shop
and picks up a chicken to cook for dinner.
He gets home and unwraps the chicken, and
before he cooks it, he has sex with it. Then
he cleans it out, roasts it, and eats it alongside
a nice glass of chardonnay.group.
You do the exact same task, 
now compare against ethnic groups.
It turns out none of the ethnic groups are
listing the effect; people don’t think
Hispanic Jack is likely to have sex with his chicken
before he eats it. But they think Atheist
Jack might have sex with the chicken before
eating it. For the final example, I want to
turn to a more severe moral violation. All
of these initial ones are kind weird and bizarre,
but in terms of consequentialist morality,
they’re not that bad. We don’t like the
puppy-kicker, but most of the rest of them
are just bizarre, so I wanted to come up with
one unambiguously immoral description. We
have Dax. When he was a little kid, he liked
hurting animals in his neighborhood. As he
grew up, he didn’t get much fun out of hurting
animals anymore, so he started hurting people. Now, he has the dismembered bodies of
5 homeless people buried in his basement. Basically trying to come up with something so bad that
people wouldn’t think an atheist would do it.
Comparing to
different religious groups, people don’t
think that most of these religious groups
might be a serial killer
but they think that the serial killer is probably an atheist.
I haven’t really talked too much about my 
subjects in all of this.
You might be asking yourself
a question somewhat along these lines:
"Who are these people who have this intuition?”
Across all those studies, I asked people to
rate their belief in god from 0-100, so Dawkins
to devout, and you can see this isn’t a
strongly religious population. I get this
weird bimodal distribution, where I have religious
people and some nonreligious people. Across
all these studies, I did an aggregate analysis,
where I grabbed only people who self-identified
as atheists and rated their belief in god
at 0 to see if they would show the same effect.
It turns out that they do. It’s to a much
smaller extent than the overall effects, but
even my atheists still think that these perpetrators
of immoral acts are more likely to belong
to atheists than any of those other groups.
These were all participants in America, so
maybe this is a weird American problem. Maybe
people here are assuming that, without religion,
you’re capable of engaging in various immoral actions.
But what about the rest of the world?
I took the serial killer example and got in touch with
friends and friends-of-friends and
acquaintances and acquaintances-of-acquaintances,
and we decided to run the study again in the
US as well as a few other places around the globe.
Here’s the list of countries where
this has been run. Notice that we have some
of the least religious countries on earth
represented here. We’ve got the Czech Republic,
the Netherlands, Mainland China. Australia
and New Zealand tend to not be that strongly
culturally religious. Data are still rolling
in. We don’t have the New Zealand data yet,
but it turns out if we look at all these other
countries, where do people intuitively assume
the serial killer is more likely to be an
atheist? The effect holds up everywhere we’ve
looked so far except for in Finland. If we
wanted to put that back up on the map, all
of the red arrows are people who intuitively
think that atheists might be immoral. That
solitary purple arrow is where they think
that atheists are all right. Again, looking
at this whole sample, if I still only pull
the people who rate their belief in god at
0, they’re still showing the same effect,
albeit to a smaller extent. So to summarize,
what’s driving people’s negative perceptions
of atheists? I think it might have to do with
people’s intuitive perceptions about the
origins of morality. This is nicely summarized
by Dostoevsky back in the day: “Without
God and the future life? It means everything
is permitted now, one can do anything?”
So without religion to keep you honest, are
you capable of doing whatever you want? At
least according to my participants, they’re
saying yeah, you’re capable of engaging
in lots of immoral action if you’re not religious.
I need to thank friends and family
whose names I took without asking for all
the people in my scenarios. I can thank them
now. Also thanks to the people who’ve helped
out with this research over the years.
