God and Behaviour
November 8, 2010
Neil Reynolds of the Globe and Mail has a really interesting article on studies done by psychologist Jesse Bering who has studied the relationship between God and morality. It turns out that children who are unsupervised will cheat more than children who are told that they are being supervised by an imaginary princess. No surprise here. What is surprising is that adults will cheat less when they believe they are under the supervision of God (or a god).
Bering spins this research off in an evolutionary direction but I think his work has interesting ramifications in terms of the debate on whether theism makes people more moral than atheism.
Thoughts?
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The counter-argument will be Muslim suicide bombers, and I think that brings out a relevant point: it actually matters what the character of the theos in the theism is. Not all theisms are of a kind. Some theisms (and some Christianities) will indeed inspire people to be better than a secular atheist would be inspired to be under his worldview of sheer materialism, while other theisms (and other Christianities) will inspire them to be worse than a secular atheist who has to fear the power of other men and society to punish him.
And for that matter, not all non-theisms are of a kind, either. I think Christians need to just drop the debate over whether “religion” is good for society. They need to argue that submitting to Jesus, King of kings and Lord of lords, is good for society.
It all depends on what the agent surveying people expects of them. Surveillance doesn’t necessarily make people behave better, it makes the behave more in accordance with the values of whoever is watching them. Of course responding to such surveillance makes it is though people are behaving “correctly” in a cynical way to obtain some kind of reward.