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(82,333 posts)
Sat Sep 13, 2014, 02:09 PM Sep 2014

Religious or not, we all misbehave

In a new study, scientists tracked people’s 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 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.”

Lab studies have limitations, however. The artificial scenarios they rely on can’t 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 Peter’s 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 they’d 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.

The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N = 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious and nonreligious participants did not differ in the likelihood or quality of committed moral and immoral acts. Being the target of moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on happiness, whereas committing moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on sense of purpose. Analyses of daily dynamics revealed evidence for both moral contagion and moral licensing. In sum, morality science may benefit from a closer look at the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of everyday moral experience.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1340
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