Study links willingness to cheat, viewpoint on God

The study found no difference in the ethical behavior of believers and nonbelievers. But participants who saw God as compassionate were more likely to cheat than those who believed in an angry, punitive God.

The study, titled "Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior" was peer reviewed and published earlier this month in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-beliefs-morals-20110430,0,4211564.story?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+delicious%2Fgqlf+%28Christian+Headlines+Top+Headlines%29

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Interesting. I urge you to read the entire article before commenting.

Shit just hits the fan if you try to label them as such :eyes:

...(fill in the blank). Strong medicine. In the case of "You will burn in Hell if you have any kind of sex that this particular religion says is sinful" it probably leads to people not doing the banned act but being messed up mentally over the guilt of even thinking about it.

<<Excerpt from article: The authors found that 95% of Americans believe in God, but conceive of that higher being in very different ways. About 28% believe in an "authoritative" God who is engaged in the world and judgmental, and about 22% in an engaged but "benevolent" God who loves us despite our failings. Two other groups of believers view the deity as more abstract and less engaged: About 21% conceive of a "critical" God who keeps track of our sins and may render judgment in the afterlife, and about 24% see a "distant" God who set the universe in motion but is not involved in day-to-day life.>>

So nearly three out of four Americans believe in an authoritative, judgmental, punishing, or could-care-less God. That's scary. If so many Americans that believe, have a view of God as almost an evil, nasty, mean being, it almost explains a lot of what's going on in our country today, since the right wing influence that took over from Reagan to the present and has been running the show, is religious.

I lived in Europe and found that, save for the skinheads (whom I consider right wingers as well, and who are equally insane here and in Europe), the right wingers here are far more authoritarian and Machiavellian here than right wingers are in Europe. That might be because right wingers here tend to be religious. Not all, but I'd say the majority.

Let's take things to an extreme and see if they become absurd.

Let's assume that there is life after death. There are two options: Either those so living do something, or they're warehoused and do nothing.

If the former, imagine a Hitler or Stalin. An unconditionally loving God would love Hitler and Stalin as much as anybody else. If there's no accounting for acts during life, they'd get as much authority as anybody else. Truly, a compassionate God. (/sarcasm off) In other words, such a god is not compassionate.

If the latter, everybody floats around for eternity looking for something to do and being denied it. Unless everybody is immediately zombie-ized or made to think that pondering eternity for eternity is a gee-whiz fun activity. Yet another truly compassionate view of God. (/sarcasm off) This deity's also a schmuck.

The vengeful God that just destroys the Hitlers and Stalins at least end the suffering--whether that of the guilty or of their possible victims. This kind of nasty, mean God is a step up in terms of compassion from the "compassionate God." How's that for bizarre?

At least the "He could care less" folk are into indifference in a principled way. Then the God that produces either of these outcomes is indifferent from the get-go and we've learned nothing about him.

The atheists have it down pat. No God, the universe sucks, you're temporarily together as an entity of some sort then you're not--recycled, for the most part. Hitler, in the long run, is no better or worse than Mandela or Obama or Mabel or Nancy (two women I knew in church, the first cranky and the second really sweet), and even in the intermediate run "better or worse" wind up stripped of meaning. Then you're up against whether you fear authority or slavishly follow it, either out of external constraints or internalized constrants buttressed by some sort of rationalization.

participants who indicated suspicion about one of the tasks in the study, or the true nature of the experiment, were excluded from analysis ... Neither religious devotion nor ethnicity had an effect on likelihood of cheating, but a sex difference was found showing higher cheating behavior among women ... No differences in cheating were found between self-described believers and nonbelievers"
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a936635720~frm=abslink

It's a small sample, of 18 to 22 year-olds, and 10% of the sample concluded something screwy was going on, so the investigators didn't consider them further

The researchers don't consider moral development: "If I do wrong I will be punished" gives way to "I will obey the authorities" and then to "There are universal standards we should all uphold." In adolescence, "I will obey the authorities" often has little force

who didn't believe s/he was entitled to cheat--that there was nothing at all wrong with it. Perhaps not oddly, none of them were mature students. They all fell into that late-teens, early twenties slot, and many told me they'd been tacitly encouraged to cheat in high school to keep the school's scores up.

other interesting bits and pie



Most atheists in this forum will not agree with this point.

This experiment involved 100 undergraduates. How representative is this of society as a whole?