Does seeing things as if you were God rather than yourself make you less biased towards members of outgroups? Acccording to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jeremy Ginges et al. (reference below, free access, and Scott Atran is a co-author), the answer is “yes.” This was the result of a psychology experiment conducted on 555 Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 18.
The study was motivated by wanting to know whether taking God’s viewpoint made the subjects more moral, at least in terms of valuing people’s lives equally:
For religions such as Islam that believe in a moralizing God capable of punishing immoral behavior, thinking about God should invoke religious norms. If, on the whole, religious belief devalues the lives of nonbelievers, placing them outside the scope of moral concern, then people should believe that God prefers parochial choices that imply a decrease in the relative value of the lives of nonbelievers. However, if God is seen as promoting universal moral laws, and if those laws conflict with intergroup bias, participants should believe that God would prefer choices that more equally value human life regardless of religious identity.
Now given that the Qur’an repeatedly devalues the lives of nonbelievers, to the extent of mandating their deaths, you might wonder why belief in Allah (whose words are the Qur’an) would lead you to become more tolerant of unbelievers when taking His viewpoint rather than your own. But never mind; we can ponder the meaning of the results after we see them.
The 555 Palestinian children were equally divided among males and females, with 64% coming from the West Bank and the rest from Gaza. Ginges et al. claim, reasonably, that their experiment was best conducted in areas of inter-group violence, which may promote more acute thinking about moral duties.
The children were presented with a modified version of the classic “trolley problem,” a moral dilemma made famous by Phillippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson. You probably know it: a person is facing a situation in which five people are on the track of a runaway trolley and sure to be killed. But if you throw a switch, you can divert the trolley onto another track where there’s only one person. Do you throw the switch, saving five lives but sacrificing one? Most people answer “yes”: it’s the right thing to do.
An alternative version requires you not to flip a switch, but to throw a fat person off a bridge onto the tracks to stop the trolley, again saving five lives but taking more direct action to sacrifice one—via physically throwing someone to his death. (A “person of size” is specified because you yourself are supposed to be too light to stop the trolley.) As I recall, in this case most people say it’s immoral to throw that person to his death, even though the result is the same as with throwing the switch. The difference is that people think the “throwing the fat man” method is more immoral because you’re directly harming a person by laying hands on him. Regardless of what you think, the difference in answers tells us something about our innate moral reactions.
Since the Palestinian children weren’t familiar with trolleys, the researchers used a runaway truck instead. The problem posed was this: do you jump off a bridge yourself to stop the truck and save five children? And does it matter whether the five children are Palestinian or Jewish Israelis?
Another version of the dilemma was posed (these were divided evenly among the children): facing the same truck, do you throw a fat Palestinian in front of it to stop it? If so, do you prefer to save the Israeli or Palestinian children?
As I said, these two dilemmas were divided among the children. Surprisingly, the results didn’t differ between the “jump” and “push” questions, so the data were combined. But in both cases, all children had to answer their question for both Palestinian victims and for Israeli victims.
Then each group of children had to answer the same question again, but this time from the viewpoint of Allah. Here’s how the questions were posed (they were posed by two Palestinian investigators, in case you were wondering):
One more note: the authors add that “The majority of our children were very religious and prayed regularly (>80%).”
I’ll be brief with the results, encapsulated in the table below. Remember that the results of the “throw” and “jump” questions were lumped bcause they didn’t differ among groups.
There are two rows, with “self” representing how children answered when they were to make the judgment themselves, and “Allah” representing which action they thought Allah would approve of. “Ingroup bias” repesents those children who said that either they or God would favor the Palestinian children over the Israeli ones, “no bias” are respondents who showed no preference between potential Palestinian or Israeli victims in either saving or killing the children, and “outgroup bias” are those who approved of saving Israeli but not Palestinian children:
As you see, thinking about the dilemma from Allah’s prespective led the children to reduce their ingroup bias by 28% (12/42), making them more neutral about the value of Israeli versus Palestinian lives. The proportion favoring the lives of Israeli children, which as expected was low (3%), didn’t change. The authors say this:
These results reveal that participants believed that they had preferences different from those of God when it came to answering certain moral dilemmas. Rather than encouraging divisive tribalism, participants believed that God had relatively stronger preferences than they did to treat the value of human lives equally, regardless of religious identity.
There are other analyses, but the table above gives the important result. One other finding, though: they asked the children another question and correlated its answer with the answers above:
To demonstrate the relevance of our ingroup bias measure for understanding intergroup violence, we regressed “yes” answers to a question asking participants whether they thought it was their “duty as Muslims” to kill nonbelievers, on an overall measure of ingroup bias for evaluation of lives (average of self and God’s perspective). We created dichotomous measures for ingroup bias giving a score of 1 if participants showed ingroup bias and a score of 0 if they did not. Ingroup bias was related to approval of intergroup violence; those who showed bias were more likely to believe it their duty to kill nonbelievers (B = 0.45, SE = 0.18, z = 2.52, P= 0.01).
If that’s TL/DR, children who thought it was their duty to kill nonbelievers were more likely to show ingroup bias whether they took their own point of view or that of Allah. Curiously, the authors don’t say how many children actually answered “yes” or “no” to the question about killing nonbelievers.
Ginges et al. conclude from their study that there’s nothing special about religion that “invariably” (note the weasel word) promotes violence against outgroups. To avoid distorting this, I’ll give their conclusion directly from the paper (my emphasis):
Humans will fight, kill, and die for a variety of abstract beliefs or entities, including national rights and ideological doctrines of many types. Together with intriguing prior work showing how priming God can increase cooperation with outgroups, or how costly signaling of religious belief can increase trust across religious boundaries, our findings cast doubt on the notion that there is something special about religious faith, including Islamic belief, that invariably favors promotion of violent intergroup conflict.
This sounds a bit like extrapolating their findings beyond the data, even if they do consider religious faith as an “ideological doctrine”. And, given that most of the children were pious Muslims to begin with, how do we interpret the change in attitudes when they take God’s point of view? Do religous people normally take God’s point of view?
And even when they do interpret Allah’s wishes, the religious bias doesn’t go away. If that were the case, then nearly 100% of the children would fall into the “no bias” column in the second row. What we see is that 66% are in that group (up from 55%, not a huge effect), but that the preference for Palestinian over Israelis lives is still in the ratio of ten to one.
I’d like to see further questions alone these lines, although this study was part of a larger survey. What would the children say if asked whether they (versus Allah) would approve the killing of infidels, adulterers, or apostates? Would they become less tolerant of violence when taking Allah’s viewpoint?
In the end, I’m not sure what to make of these results, except for the data themselves: if you take Allah’s viewpoint, you’re less approving of outgroup violence. Will that change the children’s minds if they think about it?
And how do we translate these results into action? Is it even practical to ask kids to think not on their own, but as if they were God? As for the conclusions just above in bold, I don’t know what to make of the authors’ statement that there’s nothing “special” about religion or Islam that promotes violence. Maybe not, if you construe “faith” as a brand of divisive and unthinking ideology. But unless you’re of the Armstrongian or Greenwaldian stripe, religious faith does inspire violence, and—or so I think—Islam does it more often than other religions.
Ginges, J., H. Sheikh, S. Atran, and N. Argo. 2016. Thinking from God’s perspective decreases biased valuation of the life of a nonbeliever. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113:316-319.
I just thought of yet another Outside the Box solution to The Trolley Problem – maybe it’s not new:
Rush into the fat person and tackle him and CLING TO THEM, falling in the tracks, taking both lives… that is, if you can’t do it yourself.
The problem I’ve always had with these thought experiments is that as originally presented there are supposed to be only two choices (or whatever fixed number). I complained about that myself – I had run too many RPGs for that to be convincing!
For example, although I don’t endorse the answer as the moral or even prudential answer, I did come up with the following additional option for the “shoot the Indian case” that B. Williams initiated. Take the gun the racist offers you, and *shoot him* (and his guys), not the Indian. This was just an off-the cuff to prove the point that it is difficult to know what one is concluding from a thought experiment.
In fact, as I thought up recently, the “reasoning from the false” is an interesting situation in general. In classical logic, this would introduce irrelevancies and falsehoods! (I first came up with *that* when realizing that H. Putnam’s “twin earth” is nomologically inconsistent as to what happens in twin earth people’s biosynthesis of proteins!)
anyone who has run RPG or played them (and I mean pen/paper RPGs, not the falsely named computer games), knows that the GM or the players will come up with many many more possibilities, much to the glee and annoyance of each other.
anyone who has run RPG or played them (and I mean pen/paper RPGs, not the falsely named computer games), knows that the GM or the players will come up with many many more possibilities, much to the glee and annoyance of each other.
If you have an RPG, just us it to blow up the trolley! 😉
The illusion of being God is constrained by experience and knowledge. A child or even most adults, if asked to be a God, would be a puny God. It would be like having the child run a 100 m dash against Usain Bolt.
Whenever I encounter the name “Scott Atran” I feel extra skeptical. I worry that even if the children are not too biased, Atran himself might be.
How old were these children? Why did they question children and not adults? Or both?
As to pratical action, perhaps someone could erect “What would God do?” billboards all over the middle east and see if violence goes down.
The “Who would Jesus Bomb?” bumper stickers seem to have this purpose. It’s easier to think, “I am a Christian and we are bombing X to defend [US/ourselves/Christianity]” than it is to think, “Jesus would bomb X”. In this case the (somewhat/often) pacifistic image of Jesus is part of what is clashing here, and also that Jesus is omnipotent so it is a bit odd thinking of him needing to use something so crude as bombs to achieve some aim. But there is also a residual of “what would Jesus approve” as well.
I have wondered how effective that slogan is at actually causing cognitive dissonance among war-mongering but otherwise serious Christians. I have no idea. It works for me, but I’m not the target audience.
A high, high proportion of adults know about the dilemma. Finding naïve adults in an otherwise homogeneous sample group is harder than you’d expect.
Same problem with Milgrom-esque experiments (“prison guards” and “electric shocks”).
Here is the relevant part of what I said over at phys.org when the research was presented:
“The research seems to be flawed.
While the paper is paywalled*, it is embedded in a larger survey of _political_ opinions, and nowhere in the supplement is belief (or even family’s religion) listed. Also, all participants are 11-19 years of age, notably they had to adjust the initial experiment to get the youngest children to understand. [ http://www.pnas.o…sapp.pdf ]
The result is therefore not representative of whole populations, nor likely of religious thinking.”
* I see there is now a free link, but I can’t be arsed to study it again.
God has a point of view? I thought He/She created everything, gave one command, “Don’t eat the fruit…”, they ate the fruit and were sent out on their own… That’s the liberal Methodist view I grew up with. I’d still be a Methodist if I could find one like the last one where God was an idea, not a reality. There’s a great deal worth considering in all sacred texts if you don’t personify the source.
The experiment attempted to target real people, not Sofistikated Feologicickians (™), so they had strange “normal” beliefs, like “a God exists” and “God thinks and behaves like me”.
Delusionationalism (TM) is not limited to theists… 😉
What is the difference between the Islamic view of
unbelievers (who never were Muslims)
and
apostates (folks who were Muslim once and no longer are)?
I know the penalty for the latter is mostly regarded as death.
You can check in, but you can’t check out.
Not sure that a study or survey such as this really answers the question regarding influence from the religious leader. Using children is also strange? Most of the violence is caused and carried out in the world by adults and children are primarily victims. If the intent is to convince us that religion is a positive factor in taking a higher moral road, this won’t do it.
Look at what is going on in Syria, in detail today and find something positive to say about religious influence.
Religion is helping to defuse the population bomb.
Well, you threw down the gauntlet!
I’m mildly pleased with the results. It looks like some kids (of some age and depth of religious belief) find that if asked to step back a bit from their own perspective, value lives of potential enemies as well as colleagues. Not many, not much, but some. I don’t see this as the great endorsement of religion that the authors seem to, but some days it’s hard to find anything even a little bit positive in the news.
“Ingroup bias was related to approval of intergroup violence; those who showed bias were more likely to believe it their duty to kill nonbelievers (B = 0.45, SE = 0.18, z = 2.52, P= 0.01).”
What percentage indicates “more likely” relative to those without the ingroup bias? Given the degree to which the authors are softening their language, I’m pretty sure the omission of the results regarding this question was not, in the least, accidental.
Of course, the likely fatwa against pretending you are God that this study may engender would obviate any advantages to that practice.
What this study really did is show that if you think about a problem from a different point a view (freethought) you can come to a different conclusion. So, rather than exculpating religion as a source of violence, what they are really doing is showing that freethought and reason lead to less ingroup bias. Religion doesn’t generally ask for this behavior. It’s a bit like asking racists to take the point of view of an unbiased judge in a court case involving a member of a race that they don’t particularly like, and then saying that, because they had a nominal decrease in bias against the defendants that racism doesn’t “invariably” cause ingroup bias.
I’m astounded that this paper made it into PNAS!! I read it a few days ago and was disturbed for the rest of the evening. Here’s the last sentence of their significance paragraph: “Beliefs about God may promote more equal valuation of human life regardless of religious identity, encouraging application of universal moral rules to believers and nonbelievers alike.”
This is a grotesque overreach, as they use the words “regardless of religious identity” when they didn’t test whether kids from different religious backgrounds respond comparatively with more or less bias when thinking from their perspective of g*d; rather, they only tested whether religious Muslim kids responded with less bias when thinking from Allah’s perspective.
What about moral reasoning among kids that aren’t religious?
Good point. That’s a major error. By putting that in their conclusion they raise the question of their initial biases going into the study. Were they basically attempting to prove that religion is a force for good? I’m sure some theocrats will cite this paper in debate with atheists.
I dislike these studies because I think they use an improper control. They’re basically comparing “answer off the top of your head” to “stop and think for a while about X,” then concluding that thinking about X is what changes the answers. Maybe. But maybe having the subject stop and think about the topic from a more objective standpoint in general is what’s doing it. So a proper comparison for “what would Allah approve of” would be “okay now I want you to think more about the question for the next 10 seconds.” Or maybe you ask a variety of “what would your mom/pastor/president approve of” and then see whether Allah/mom/pastor/president makes a difference. If it doesn’t, then the only thing you’re really showing is that people will often change their gut response when they think more deeply about a problem. You aren’t showing that thinking religious thoughts per se does anything at all.
✔️
Yes, very good point.
Yes, you would need a design where half of the group were asked the questions in one order and half in the other order. I haven’t (bothered to) read the paper so don’t know if this was done.
If this wasn’t done then the results are worthless.
Ethnic and religious differences are real, and are the real source of group animosity (look at secular humanists and Christian fundamentalists). Society has to have a law on the age of consent, for example, or laws on abortion, infanticide or birth control, and those laws are sure to step on someone’s religious or anti-religious sensibilities.
Politics is about friends and enemies. (And yes, some people will pick YOU for an enemy, even if you don’t select them.) If you can whip people up and make them afraid of the other, then you can develop a power base and even maybe gain political control. So the Prince is often “religious” and often invokes “religion” but is often quite unmoved by the actual tenants of said religion, except when it can be used to differentiate in-groups from others. You don’t have to use religious differences of course, plenty of other categories out there, but politicized religion can be violent, and if not violent, then frequently obnoxious if you wind up on the wrong side.
You always have pious people who lead lives of genuine compassion, and side-by-side you always have ethno-nationalists and racists and trouble-makers pointing out ethnic and religious differences in order to amass power. You can see this in the anti-LGBT set, some folks just have a quite moral objection to homosexuality, and then you have the Westboro Baptist Set.
To say religion has no connection to violence is to over-simplify. To say that the elimination of religion will stop violence is to unreasonably distinguish religious identity from other forms of conflict. There is no identity without difference, and so politicized identity will always involve group conflict, and sometimes violence.
Why human groups self-organize generally on ethno-religious lines (“in nature”) is a separate anthropological question, but I suspect there is a right answer (it promotes trust and social cooperation).
“the actual tenants of said religion,”
And God is the landlord, is He? 😬
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Oh, don’t be such a pendant.
LOL!
But I often hang around here.
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You got me! I should send you everything I post so you can edit it in advance. At least I spelled the wrong word correctly.
It is extremely suspicious that the authors did not prominently state the percentage of respondents who thought that apostates should be killed. That is a number which is directly relevant to their thesis. This suggests the authors are deliberately massaging their report to bolster a predetermined conclusion.
Have your grains of salt at the ready on two counts: 1.Scott Atran 2. Sociology.
Does anyone have the URL for the PDF for this study (the URL that gets around the paywall)? Your help is appreciated.