Transcript morepeacefulwithoutGod.htm

Why Bush needs to talk to God
more
formerly
Would the world be more
peaceful without God?
Ian Hansen
Collaborators
• Ara Norenzayan
• Jeremy Ginges
• Ilan Dar-Nimrod
Is Religion pure tolerance, pure
intolerance, or a wild card?
• Our investigations on this question are inspired
by research findings that religious affiliation is a
very strange moderator in mortality salience
experiments (e.g. Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006)
• Generally, people who are reminded of their
inevitable death tend to become more hateful
and dismissing of the worldview of The Other
(billions of studies, Greenberg, Solomon,
Pycsynski & colleagues)
Shouldn’t this effect be found
primarily among religious people?
• Religions are supposedly motivated in part
by a need to deny death
• Religious people tend to be more right
wing than secular people
• Being devoted to one religion and being
intolerant towards other religions should
go hand in glove
In fact…
…religious people often open up more (or close off less)
to the Religious Other under mortality salience
N
N
Support for a Godly-Islam
-will-overthrow-thefaithless-West essay
Laughably extreme religion
argument I
– Religion is a cause of
all war and prejudice:
all religions teach
nothing but conquest
and intolerance
The Inquisition burning
some Jezebel-DelilahSalome-Frida Unibrow
Laughably extreme religion
argument II
– Religion is a
solution to all war
and prejudice: all
religions teach
nothing but love
and universal
brotherhood.
Buddy Christ not
burning anyone at all
An intermediate position
• Gordon Allport (1950): “Religion makes prejudice
and it unmakes prejudice. While the creeds of
the great religions are universalistic, all stressing
brotherhood, the practice of these creeds is
frequently divisive and brutal. The sublimity of
religious ideals is offset by the horrors of
persecution in the name of these same ideals ”
• This sounds about right, but the empirical legacy
on this is muddy
Allport’s Error
• A “two types of people”
theory: “intrinsic” type
people vs. “extrinsic” type
people
• Neither type seems all that
good at unmaking prejudice
• Our explanation: the
tolerant face of religion may
co-arise with its intolerant
face, a la yin and yang…or
Jekyll and Hyde
Devotional Religiosity: The Dr.
Jekyll of Religion?
• Faith, devotion to the divine, prayer
?
=
Devotional Bush
Dr. Jekyll
Coalitional religiosity: The Mr. Hyde
of Religion?
• Exclusivity, authoritarianism, dogmatism, fundamentalism
?
=
Coalitional Bush
Mr. Hyde
Typical correlations between
devotional and coalitional religiosity
Participant Variable
1
2
3
4
5
6
1. Devotion to Divine
(.96)
.81
.41
.61
.35
.33
(.91)
.61
.74
.49
.45
(.94)
.82
.57
.56
(.93)
.63
.67
(.87)
.57
2. Devotion to one’s religion
3. Exclusivity
4. Fundamentalism
5. Dogmatism
6. Authoritarianism
(.89)
Would Dr. Jekyll be relatively
pleasant company if it weren’t for
Mr. Hyde?
• The baseness so commonly charged to
religion’s account are thus, almost all of them,
not chargeable to religion proper, but rather to
religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of
corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most
of them in their turn chargeable to religion’s
wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic
dominion.
• -- William James (1982/1902, p. 337), The
Varieties of Religious Experience
“Wicked” = “fit for natural
selection”?
Jekyll and Hyde as two
complementary processes of
adaptive ingroup favoritism
• Devotional religiosity: aids the imaginative
expansion of the boundary of moral inclusion
• Coalitional religiosity: aids the pragmatic
hardening of the boundary of moral exclusion
• Both processes complementary, but very
different—and when isolated from each other
may predict very different things.
Why the religion and prejudice
literature is an inconclusive mess
Split sample of 194 Canadian students into the most devoted half and the least
devoted half, 97 “devoted” and 97 “not devoted”
6.5
6
5.5
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
not devoted
devoted
io
ot
vi
di
ne
n
v
de
t
in
c
si
ir n
re
ty
si
o
i
lig
a
ho
ut
m
a
rit
s
ni
a
ri
m
tis
a
gm
do
f
d
un
ity
ta
en
am
m
lis
e
iv
us
l
xc
Coalitional attitude
not controlled:
(more devoted also
more coalitional)
No difference in intolerance or
violence
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
religious
violence
aggressive
antipathy
civil
intolerance
religious
antipathy
not devoted
devoted
So is the empirical psychology of religion doomed to be null result-ridden
contradictory useless garbage?
Disentangling Jekyll from Hyde
Split the sample in half a different way. This time divide it by their scores on this
formula: devotional – coalitional [mean(divine devotion+intrinsic religiosity)mean(authoritarianism+dogmatism+fundamentalism+exclusivity)]
6.5
6
5.5
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
not devoted
devoted
o
ne
vi
i
d
v
de
n
tio
tr
in
in
c
si
re
io
lig
ty
si
au
ni
rit
o
th
ia
ar
sm
a
m
g
do
m
tis
nd
fu
m
is
l
ta
en
am
e
i
us
l
xc
ty
vi
Coalitional attitude
controlled
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
religious
violence
aggressive
antipathy
civil
intolerance
not devoted
devoted
religious
antipathy
Intolerance
Split this way, the more devoted are
less intolerant and less violent
What about the Middle East?
Baruch Goldstein
Mahmud Muhamad Shaldan
Similar pattern among Palestinians
Odds of supporting
“martyrdom operations”
Pray 5 times a day vs.
never pray
1.38 : 1 equal odds
Attend mosque 5 times
a day vs. only religious
festivals
2.11 : 1 double odds
Similar pattern among Israeli
settlers
Experimental
data
20
%
15
10
5
0
PRAY
NO PRIME
SY NAGOGUE
Percentage of settlers who believed that Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of
Palestinians was “extremely heroic” as a function of prime.
0
**
FULL SAMPLE
6: 1 6
ORTHODOX
(RUSSIA)
3
JEWISH (ISRAEL)
2
HINDU (INDIA)
MUSLIM
(INDONESIA)
PROTESTANT (UK)
CATHOLIC
(MEXICO)
Odds of supporting
combative martyrdom
Similar pattern across the globe
***
Prayer
5
***
4
Organized
attendance
*
***
#
1: 1 1
#
# p < .1 * p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001
Predicting religious scapegoating
Effect of exclusivity
Effect of prayer
0.3
0.3
0.25
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.15
0.05
0
0.05
0.2
0.1
SI
VI
ST
LU
SI
VI
ST
EX
C
+
D
Not exclusivist
Exclusivist
Effect of organized attendance
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
EX
CL
US
IV
IS
T
AY
PR
Not regular attender
Regular attender
PR
AY
+
EX
CL
U
SI
VI
ST
NE
0
NO
Pray regularly
NONE
AT
TE
N
Do not pray regularly
EX
CL
U
D
AT
TE
N
NO
NE
0
ATTEND
PRAY
PRAY +
ATTEND
Independent relationship of religion
variables to war and oppression
0.8
Exclusivity
Prayer
Prayer (devotion) and
exclusivity (coalition)
make opposite
predictions
military
spending/gdp
arms vol
/gdp
Refugees
per capita
-0.8
Lack of
freedom
0
Independent relationship of religion
variables to war and oppression
Exclusivity
Prayer
Attendance
0.8
Caveat! Religious
attendance (coalitional)
predicts peace and
freedom as well or better
than prayer (devotional)!
military
spending/gdp
arms vol
/gdp
Refugees
per capita
-0.8
Lack of
freedom
0
Does religious attendance
have sociologically
redeeming features? Can
it be considered a kind of
constructive collective
action?
So…devotional and coalitional
religiosity are intertwined
Coalitional
religiosity
Devotional
religiosity
But they make opposite predictions
about religious intolerance and
support for violence
Predicts intolerance
Coalitional
religiosity
Devotional
religiosity
Predicts tolerance
So pray that Bush listens to God
more…
…and listens to Dick and Rummy less