Chris Ray - November 7th, 2008 in Commentary 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

Paul Bloom, an extraordinarily erudite cognitive scientist and Professor of Psychology at Yale, has just published a piece on Slate defending atheists against data suggesting that (American) secular types are less “nice” and less charitable than their religious counterparts. After giving a rough sketch of data suggesting that people who are psychologically primed to think they are being watched at all times (in this case, by God) are more likely to be charitable (alternatively, I read this as religious people are easier to coerce…) and that atheists give less blood and less money to charity, Bloom explains:

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others…. The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”

This is an explanation that is intuitively quite satisfying, and one with a great deal of emotional appeal to secularists who are being tired that their bitter despondence towards life is because they have no God (or vice versa). Mr. Bloom, who by eerie coincidence I just happen to have met in person literally minutes before reading the Slate article, considers himself to be a mind-body materialist (he didn’t say if he was an atheist or not, but he does say that he has never held any strong religious views despite being raised Conservative Jewish) and so we must be wary of the potential emotional appeal his hypothesis both to ourselves and to the hypothesizer.

This piece has already been circulated on Pharyngula, but at this stage Bloom’s work is still preliminary. His hypothesis is good, however, in that it makes testable predictions; there are certain things we should expect if Bloom’s hypothesis is true:

1. Any social group that is discriminated against routinely ought to have lower rates of charitable giving, blood donation, or other measures of “niceness.”
2. Any majority social group that enjoys any kind of de facto or de jure privilege in a society ought to have higher rates of those same measures than the discriminated minority.
3. Groups that become more tolerated over time ought to, ceteris peribus, have increased rates of charitable “niceness.”

I do not have any of the data on those three predictions, if indeed such data exists. I invite anyone who is both interested and knowledgeable in this line of reasoning, please drop a link to some relevant research in the comments page to see if we can confirm Mr. Bloom’s promising, and optimistic, hypothesis.

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Tags: morality, Paul Bloom, science