People intuitively associate religiosity with goodness and atheism with wrongdoing

Two experiments, one conducted in the United States and the other in New Zealand, found that people tend to have an intuitive moral bias linking religiosity with virtue and prosocial behavior. Similarly, they associated atheism with transgressive behavior. The research was published in Scientific Reports.

Moral bias refers to the tendency for moral values or judgments to influence reasoning, perception, or decision-making in a non-objective way. It can cause people to evaluate information, actions, or individuals more favorably or unfavorably based on whether they align with their own moral beliefs. This bias often leads to the selective acceptance of evidence that supports one’s values while dismissing or distorting conflicting information.

Moral bias plays a role in political, religious, and ethical debates, where facts are interpreted through a moral lens. It can also affect scientific reasoning, legal judgments, and policy decisions. For example, a person might reject valid research simply because its conclusions feel morally uncomfortable. Moral bias is often unconscious and can subtly shape how people frame problems or perceive fairness.

One frequently studied example of moral bias is the implicit belief that atheists are inherently immoral, while religious individuals are moral. A previous study found that moral bias against atheists is real and global in scope, but it remained unclear how personal religiosity influences the degree of this bias.

Study author Alex Dayer and his colleagues aimed to explore whether religious belief is intuitively linked with extreme prosociality. They also sought to replicate previous findings suggesting a connection between atheism and serious transgressive behavior. Additionally, they investigated whether individual differences in belief in God influenced conjunction fallacy rates when participants evaluated situations involving helping behavior. A conjunction fallacy occurs when people mistakenly believe that the probability of two events occurring together is higher than the probability of one of the events alone.

The researchers conducted two studies.

In the first study, participants were 744 workers recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Forty-four percent were female. Participants were paid $0.60 for their participation. They rated their belief in God and responded to two short vignettes. One vignette described a person who was a serial murderer, while the other described a person who was a serial helper, offering food and clothes to the homeless.

For each vignette, participants indicated which of two statements they found more probable: either that the person was a teacher or that the person was a teacher who believes in God (or does not believe in God). Participants were randomly assigned to conditions where the second option specified either belief or disbelief in God. Since teachers who do or do not believe in God are subsets of all teachers, the first option (“the individual is a teacher”) is always objectively more probable. This setup tested for the conjunction fallacy.

The second study used the same design but included 600 participants from New Zealand, recruited via Prolific. Fifty-two percent were female, and participants received $1 for their participation.

In the first study, results showed that when the serial helper was described as religious, 60% of participants selected that option. When the helper was described as an atheist, only 4% selected it. This suggests a strong moral bias linking religious people with prosocial behavior.

When the person in the vignette was a serial murderer, 64% of participants selected the conjunction option when it indicated he was an atheist, compared to only 18% when he was described as religious. This finding supports the idea that participants held an implicit moral bias against atheists. Religious participants showed higher conjunction fallacy rates when the conjunction option identified the person as an atheist.

The second study in New Zealand replicated the main findings, although the differences were smaller. For the serial helper, 49% selected the religious conjunction option, compared to 5% who selected the atheist option. For the serial murderer vignette, 45% chose the atheist conjunction option, while 27% chose the religious conjunction option.

“We found evidence that religionists are conceptualized as morally good to a greater extent than are atheists conceptualized as morally bad, with comparable patterns observed in a predominantly religious society, the United States, and in a predominantly secular society, New Zealand. Notwithstanding the aforementioned moderation of these effects by individual differences in religiosity, even relatively nonreligious participants evidenced these biases in both societies, suggesting that the conceptual associations are pervasive,” the study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on the moral bias about religiosity. However, while the studies were conducted in two different countries, both the U.S. and New Zealand are English-speaking countries sharing similar cultures and cultural routes. Studies in other cultures might not yield identical results.

The paper, “Intuitive moral bias favors the religiously faithful,” was authored by Alex Dayer, Chanuwas Aswamenakul, Matthew A.Turner, Scott Nicolay, Emily Wang, Katherine Shurik, and Colin Holbrook.