Religion
Related: About this forumReligious or not, we all misbehave
In a new study, scientists tracked peoples moral and immoral behaviors using smart phones.
By Emily Underwood
11 September 2014 2:45 pm
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 Franklins little book, using smart phones to track the sins and good deeds of more than 1200 people. The new dataamong the first to be gathered on moral behavior outside of the labconfirm 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 shouldnt just make you blindly nice to everybody; it should make you more virtuous when you are interacting with others of the same faith.
Lab studies have limitations, however. The artificial scenarios they rely on cant tell researchers much about how religious and nonreligious people behave in daily life, or whether moral considerations are even relevant to how people actually behave, says Daniel Wisneski, a moral psychologist at Saint Peters University in Jersey City, New Jersey, and a co-author of the new study, which appears online today in Science.
Wisneski and colleagues used Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets to recruit 1252 adults ages 18 to 68 throughout the United States and Canada. Tempted by the possibility of winning an iPod Touch through a lottery, participants downloaded an app to their smart phones which allowed researchers to buzz them via text five times a day between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. When they opened the texts, participants were prompted to open a link where they could confidentially report whether theyd witnessed, heard about, or performed any moral or immoral acts within the past hour, and jot down a description. They also entered details about how intensely they felt about the event, rating emotions such as disgust on a 0 to 5 scale.
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/09/religious-or-not-we-all-misbehave
Abstract below. The rest is behind a paywall.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1340