So ingrained are religious prejudices in societies the world over that people tend to think that atheists are more likely to be serial killers—at least, that’s the way the New York Times reported a new social-psychology study in Nature Human Behaviour.
In the experiment, more than 3,000 participants in 13 countries were given a description of a gruesome serial killer with five dismembered bodies in his basement. To make it clear just how terrible the sociopath was, the study added that the bodies were those of “homeless people that he abducted from poor neighborhoods.” Study participants were asked, in effect, whether they thought such a person was more likely or not to be a religious believer. Twice as many guessed the generic killer was an atheist.
The lead author of the study, Will M. Gervais, told the Times they asked about hypothetical serial killers as a way to test whether people linked atheism with extreme moral depravity: Even “if people didn’t trust atheists enough to let them babysit their children, they wouldn’t necessarily assume them to be serial killers.” To which the Times responded, “But they did—overwhelmingly.”
Which means the Times (with a little help from the good professor) got the study backwards. Gervais et al. did not find that people assumed atheists to be serial killers. It was the other way round: Two-thirds of those asked to guess whether a given serial killer was religious or not, guessed the murderer was not among the faithful. It’s a very different thing to assume serial killers are atheists than it is to believe atheists are serial killers. All squares may be quadrangles, but not all quadrangles are squares.
Even if one gets things the right way round, it’s hard to give much credence to the study’s conclusion that the “recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice.” Did those study participants who guessed the killer was an atheist do so out of bias? That’s not the only conclusion one could make. We suspect that most of those who guessed the serial killer lacked religion did so because they assumed that faith requires one not to commit mass murder. That’s not a comment on the nature of disbelievers, but rather a comment about the demands of belief.
