Abstract
Scientific research yields inconsistent and contradictory evidence relating religion to moral judgments and outcomes, yet most people on earth nonetheless view belief in God (or gods) as central to morality, and many view atheists with suspicion and scorn. To evaluate intuitions regarding a causal link between religion and morality, this paper tested intuitive moral judgments of atheists and other groups. Across five experiments (N = 1,152), American participants intuitively judged a wide variety of immoral acts (e.g., serial murder, consensual incest, necrobestiality, cannibalism) as representative of atheists, but not of eleven other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups. These findings demonstrate a prevalent intuition that belief in God serves a necessary function in inhibiting immoral conduct, and may help explain persistent negative perceptions of atheists.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-9-2014
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092302
Repository Citation
Gervais, Will M., "Everything Is Permitted? People Intuitively Judge Immorality as Representative of Atheists" (2014). Psychology Faculty Publications. 124.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/psychology_facpub/124
Supporting Information
Notes/Citation Information
Published in PLoS ONE, v. 9, issue 4, no. e92302.
© 2014 Will M. Gervais.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.