Now, a new study by Azim Shariff, at the University of Oregon, and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, have looked at how views of God affect cheating. You may remember Shariff from a pivotal study in 2008<\/a> on priming religious concepts and honesty.<\/p>\n In this new study, they sat students down to what they thought was a warm-up task on basic numeracy (adding up a bunch of numbers \u2013 simple but tedious). Unfortunately, the computer programme had a glitch that showed the answer after a few seconds. The students were asked to be honest and press the space bar to make the answer go away \u2013 without looking at it.<\/p>\n Of course, this was no glitch. In fact, they were interested in whether (and how often) the students did the honest thing and pressed the space bar.<\/p>\n It turned out that there was no difference in honesty between atheists and the religious. However, there was a big difference among<\/b><\/i> the religious.<\/p>\n Those who believed in a stern, punishing god were less likely to cheat \u2013 while those who believe compassionate, forgiving god were actually more likely to cheat! On average, the two cancelled out \u2013 which is why the religious as a whole were no different from atheists.<\/p>\n So does that mean that encouraging belief in punishing gods will reduce cheating. Well, it\u2019s not quite that simple.<\/p>\n One reason this might happen is that Shariff\u2019s study was a scientific study, done in isolation from any context. Yet the most common cause of cheating is actually when people feel that they\u2019ve been hard-done by elsewhere, as this article in the NY Times<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n \u201cCheating is especially easy to justify when you frame situations to cast yourself as a victim of some kind of unfairness,\u201d said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the use of prescription drugs to improve intellectual performance. \u201cThen it becomes a matter of evening the score; you\u2019re not cheating, you\u2019re restoring fairness.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What\u2019s more, individuals who are convinced that they have the moral high ground are actually more likely to cheat<\/a>. Perhaps believers in a punitive god have had experiences in the past that make them feel like they are victims of injustice, and also that they are strongly in the right.<\/p>\n Well, this might help to explain it, but it certainly isn\u2019t the full story, and it probably isn\u2019t the most interesting one.\u00a0 Much more interesting is the likelihood that people change adapt their concept of god to suit the society in which they find themselves. Here\u2019s Shariff and Norenzayan:<\/p>\n \u2026 the concept of a punishing God should be expected to be more widespread in societies where the threat of freeloading is high, such as those lacking effective social institutions, experiencing internal or external threats, or both. This hypothesis raises the possibility that the widespread belief in benevolent deities is a modern phenomenon\u2014the consequence of a gradual change in religious beliefs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Their point is that believing in a punishing god is actually very stress-inducing. An earlier study<\/a> found that reminders of God make Christians less fearful of death \u2013 but make Muslims more fearful! That was mainly because, unlike the Christians, they had solid belief in hell. Back then I commented that:<\/p>\n The function of Hell is to reinforce social order by threatening punishment to wrongdoers who can\u2019t be brought to justice by normal societal mechanisms. As a strategy, it\u2019s not terribly successful. Medieval Europe is not renowned as an era of peace, justice and harmony.<\/p>\n But perhaps in the absence of more effective social controls, promoting fear of hell is better than nothing. When better social controls are invented \u2013 such as in modern Europe \u2013 Hell is no longer needed.<\/p>\n If Hell is no longer needed in modern Europe, then Heaven still is. People still die, and our basic, evolved instincts make us all fear of death. The prospect of heaven can reduce that fear \u2013 but only if you abandon the inconvenient concept of hell.<\/p>\n As a result, modern Christianity, reacting to market demand, quietly drops the concept of hell, but retains the concept of heaven.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The feel-good version of religion, like atheism, is what you get when you remove danger and threat from people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Probably more important than whether you believe in a God is the type of God you believe in \u2013 from a behavioural point of view, at least. For example, believers in a judgemental god are more likely to support the death penalty, and are more likely to suffer mental ill health. Back in 2006, Gary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-51wsip9jXGg\/TbHvPymUkfI\/AAAAAAAAAxY\/PvuCTAvSM8M\/s1600\/Corruption_passionate_dualism.PNG\")
<\/a>Take, for example, this graph that I just knocked together. It plots \u2018Passionate Dualism\u2019 \u2013 based on Gary Jensen\u2019s original measure of heaven and hell beliefs \u2013 against corruption (the Corruption Perceptions Index<\/a>). It goes in the opposite way to what you might expect \u2013 the greater the level of belief in punitive gods, the more corruption a country has.<\/p>\n
\n![\"ResearchBlogging.org\"](\"https:\/\/www.researchblogging.org\/public\/citation_icons\/rb2_large_gray.png\")
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Shariff, A., & Norenzayan, A. (2011). Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 21<\/span> (2), 85-96 DOI: 10.1080\/10508619.2011.556990<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n![\"Creative](\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-sa\/2.0\/uk\/88x31.png\")
<\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"