TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2024//
TI  - Intuitive moral bias favors the religiously faithful
JO  - Scientific reports
A1  - Dayer, Alex
A1  - Aswamenakul, Chanuwas
A1  - Turner, Matthew A.
A1  - Nicolay, Scott
A1  - Wang, Emily
A1  - Shurik, Katherine
A1  - Holbrook, Colin
SP  - e18291
EP  - e18291
VL  - 14
IS  - 1
N2  - Belief in powerful supernatural agents that enforce moral norms has been theoretically linked with cooperative altruism and prosociality. Correspondingly, prior research reveals an implicit association between atheism and extreme antisociality (e.g., serial murder). However, findings centered on associations between lack of faith and moral transgression do not directly address the hypothesized conceptual association between religious belief and prosociality. Accordingly, we conducted two pre-registered experiments depicting a "serial helper" to assess biases related to extraordinary helpfulness, mirroring designs depicting a serial killer used in prior cross-cultural work. In both a predominantly religious society (the U.S., Study 1) and a predominantly secular society (New Zealand, Study 2), we successfully replicated previous research linking atheism with transgression, and obtained evidence for a substantially stronger conceptual association between religiosity and virtue. The results suggest that stereotypes linking religiosity with prosociality are both real and global in scale.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 2045-2322
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67960-4
ID  - ref1
ER  -