Members in the Media
From: Science

Religious or not, we all misbehave

Science:

Benjamin Franklin tracked his prideful, sloppy, and gluttonous acts in a daily journal, marking each moral failing with a black ink dot. Now, scientists have devised a modern update to Franklin’s little book, using smart phones to track the sins and good deeds of more than 1200 people. The new data—among the first to be gathered on moral behavior outside of the lab—confirm what psychologists have long suspected: Religious and nonreligious people are equally prone to immoral acts.

Lab studies have backed that view, by asking participants to interpret moral vignettes or play games that tempt players to cheat, says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University in New York City. In a 2008 review for Science, for example, researchers found that believers act more morally than nonreligious people only when interacting with other members of their own religious community. Such selectivity makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, Haidt says. If, as some scientists hypothesize, religion evolved to increase social cohesion, it shouldn’t just make you “blindly nice to everybody; it should make you more virtuous when you are interacting with others of the same faith.”

Read the whole story: Science

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Comments

To quote John McEnroe”you cannot be serious”. What good is a religion that makes you virtuous only when interacting with members of the same faith? Did the people involved in the 2008 Science research know the faith of everyone they were interacting with? Which religion, other than Scientology, would instruct it’s members to be virtuous around only members of only one faith?


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