Religion does not cause racism, but group morality may underlie both.
One of the professors at my university co-authored a recent meta-analysis which found that there is a relatively robust correlation between religiosity and racism. It's hard to dispute the methodology of the study, which included 55 studies with over 20,000 people. Still, I can't help but cringe at what take home message people might get from reading about this study. I can see non-religious schadenfreude and religious defensiveness resulting from a simplistic assumption that correlation equals causality.
Religion does not cause racism, or at least that's my contention. My hypothesis is that the reason they are correlated is that some people who are naturally group oriented gravitate towards religion. Other people who are group oriented gravitate towards racism. There are a large number of things that being group oriented will lead one to gravitate towards....sports teams, the military, marching bands, boy scouts, etc.. Sometimes people who are group oriented will gravitate towards more than one of these groups and so it is not so surprising that we will see a correlation between racism and membership in any of these groups.
I cannot test this hypothesis directly, but I do have some evidence for this. In their paper, they state that "In our meta-analytic review, the paradox of religious racism was traced to the group-oriented motives that underlie religiosity." From a moral foundation theory perspective, we would expect endorsement of the moral principles of Ingroup Loyalty and Authority to correspond to these group-oriented motives. In our yourmorals.org dataset, we don't have measures of racism, but we do have measures of a related construct, social dominance orientation, which concerns agreement to items like "Inferior groups should stay in their place."
In our data, there is indeed a relationship between higher social dominance orientation scores and being Christian (most of the paper's studies used Christians as their religious group). However, when I control for moral foundation questionnaire scores on the Ingroup Loyalty and Authority dimensions, there is no difference between Christians and Atheists on social dominance orientation. It is hard to visualize regression results which 'control' for other variables, but perhaps the below 2 graphs illustrate this point. Basically, one can see that Christians and Atheists have very similar patterns of social dominance orientation at corresponding levels of group level moral concern. The lines more or less overlap.
If there were a main effect of religious group, we would see the blue line consistently above the green line, indicating that at similar levels of group based moral concern, religious people are still higher on social dominance orientation.
Another way to look at the effect of religion is by self reported religious attendance. Again, if we look at the simple relationship, there is a significant positive (Beta=.098) relationship between religious attendance and social dominance orientation. However, if we control for moral foundation questionnaire scores, the relationship actually becomes negative (Beta=-.040, p=.005), indicating that at similar levels of group level moral concern, religious attendance is actually negatively related to social dominance orientation.
How real are these effects? Will they replicate? Our sample is not necessarily representative of the whole world and social dominance is perhaps a poor proxy for actual racism...but at least in this data set, there does seem to be support for the idea that group level morality explains all of the effects of religion on group level dominance, such that we might find similar effects between any cohesive group and racist attitudes, purely as a function of a desire for group cohesion. All moral concerns are double edged swords and can be virtues (patriotic donations of blood after 9/11) or vices when hypermoralized (e.g. racism toward Middle Easterners after 9/11). From this perspective, the fact that group cohesion and the hypermoralization of group cohesion co-occur is perhaps to be expected.
- Ravi Iyer
Comments
Main Themes of This Blog
- •Post-Materialism: People are increasingly motivated by values and higher order psychological needs.
- •Book Reviews – Consilience between psychology and books I read.
- •Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.
- •What are the psychological differences that make people liberal democrats, conservative republicans, or libertarians?
Vote for the Best Psych Books
Categories
- book reviews
- business of psychology
- civil politics
- consilience
- consumer psychology
- data science
- differences between republicans and democrats
- drug laws
- gross domestic product
- hypermoralism
- justice and fairness
- libertarians
- Links
- main themes of this blog
- misc
- moral confabulation
- moral confabulation in the news
- moral emotions
- moral foundations
- moral imagination
- moral psychology
- news commentary
- political psychology
- positive psychology
- Post Materialism
- ranker
- replications of other studies
- technology business
- the old polipsych
- unpublished results
- War and Peace
- yourmorals.org
Blogroll
- AboutMyJob.com
- Consumer Psychology Self-Tests @ Beyond The Purchase.Org
- Pilates Anytime – Online Pilates Classes
- Ranker Votable Lists
- Ranker's Data Blog
- Tal Yarkoni's Psychology/Informatics Blog
- Tara Met Blog
- The Music is Over – Musician Obituaries
- YourMorals.org
Explore
academia
aggression
big 5
big data
civility
coherence
conservatives
consilience
differences between liberals and conservatives
disgust
empathy
equality
equity
fairness
hypermoralism
idealistic evil
incivility
jon stewart
liberals
liberals and conservatives
libertarians
libya
mitt romney
moral absolutism
moral foundations
moral maximizing
moral psychology
neuroticism
new york times
obama
openness to experience
partisanship
peace
peer review
personality traits
political psychology
religion
romney
social dominance orientation
social psychology
stephen colbert
sxsw
technology
votehelp.org
war book reviews (10)
business of psychology (17)
civil politics (16)
consilience (18)
consumer psychology (7)
data science (3)
differences between republicans and democrats (20)
drug laws (3)
gross domestic product (1)
hypermoralism (11)
justice and fairness (6)
libertarians (9)
Links (1)
main themes of this blog (4)
misc (1)
moral confabulation (10)
moral confabulation in the news (8)
moral emotions (3)
moral foundations (4)
moral imagination (2)
moral psychology (28)
news commentary (47)
political psychology (70)
positive psychology (13)
Post Materialism (7)
ranker (5)
replications of other studies (8)
technology business (1)
the old polipsych (4)
unpublished results (26)
War and Peace (7)
yourmorals.org (84)
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
Archive
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- April 2009
- September 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- June 2006
- May 2004
- April 2004
Consumer Psychology Posts
- The Costs and Benefits of ?Living for Now?
- You are Not That Great
- Money and Happiness: The Costs and Benefits of Living for Now
- The First International Day of Happiness
- Money and Happiness: Materialists Not Happier When Purchasing Life Experiences
Last 10 Posts:
- May 7, 2013
Personality Types in Business: Conscientious CEOs & Open Technologists - April 25, 2013
Big Data Stocks? Invest in Data, not in Tools. - April 4, 2013
The Moral Foundations of Environmentalists - March 26, 2013
Your Values Predict the Stories You Choose - December 14, 2012
How to Prevent Mental Illness: Help others with their stressful life events - November 24, 2012
When is investment banking immoral? A review of Greg Smith’s book, Why I left Goldman Sachs. - November 21, 2012
On Mitt Romney and The X-Files - November 18, 2012
The Gaza Conflict and Being Pro-Peace rather than Anti-War - November 8, 2012
Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and Paul Krugman need to get out of Maslow’s Basement. - November 5, 2012
Early Voting is a Social Influence Tool, so tell everyone when you vote!
Civil Politics Posts
- The Driven Snowe: Centrist as Outsider May 17, 2013 Beau Lebette
- Millennials: Not Immune to Extreme Partisanship May 8, 2013 Beau Lebette
- A Civil Exploration of Religion May 7, 2013 Connor Wood
- Does President Obama Golf Enough? April 30, 2013 Beau Lebette
- Ever Redder More Truly Blue: The Fate of States April 25, 2013 Beau Lebette
Popular Search Terms
- libertarian psychology
- Brother sister incest stories
- Brother and sister incest story
- real brother sister incest stories
- real brother sister incest story
- examples of limitations in psychology experiments
- http://www polipsych com/2010/12/29/tony-washington-brother-sister-incest/
- hypermoralism
- the differences between gross national happiness and gross domestic product
- brother sister incest true stories


February 19th, 2010 - 06:33
This is the most interesting peice I’ve ever seen on FB. You mention that Chritians are most often tagged to measure religiosity. Is there similar work being conducted for the Muslim community?
February 20th, 2010 - 19:33
Thanks for your comment. The paper I reference is based on a combination of other research, largely in the US and so the religious samples tend to be Christian. I don’t think we have enough of a Muslim sample on our website to see if there are inter-religion differences and our sample likely wouldn’t be representative anyway. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for stuff that might answer your question though.
February 20th, 2010 - 20:58
I’m cutting/pasting the below exchange from Facebook so that I have it in one place when I revisit this topic. Good ideas/alternative hypotheses ought to be saved.
They wrote:
I think the classic Sherif minimal group studies with groups of kids shows somewhat how any group (e.g. boy scouts) can become involved in outgroup aggression. Anecdotally, I’ve seen lots of sports oriented aggression, which to me seems like the real life equivalent of a minimal group. I wouldn’t be so sure that there is something inherent in religion, per se, that does not exist in other groups. Personally, I think a variable missing might be something like perceived competition, which fosters intolerance (and MFQ-Authority/Ingroup scores). So people who perceive their religion as in competition with others might also perceive their racial group as in competition with others. But that to me still means that the religion-racism connections is an artifact of other personality differences, rather than causal. The part that most convinces me is that when I looked at religious attendance, the relationship between religion-racism became significantly negative, controlling for MFQ scores.
That’s fair and I might amend my hypothesis to say that some groups attract more fundamentalist or competitive personalities than others. I guess the question then would be whether people who have fundamentalist personalities are attracted to religion or whether certain religions make people fundamentalist. I might substitute “group oriented” or competitive for fundamentalist as I think it’s a clearer personality construct. I don’t know really what it means to be ‘fundamentalist’ as a person. My money would be on the former…that certain group oriented/competitive personalities are attracted to religion and that drives much of the correlation.
But I will admit that it’s likely that there are some religions which create a competitive urge as you describe, where you have fewer superordinate goals and more competition and therefore outgroup derogation. But I think I’d still call the correlation somewhat spurious as then membership in any competitive group likely correlates with racism…unless you have a different explanation for the mechanism which is specific to religion.
Thanks for the reference and I’ll be sure to check it out.
My one comment as a liberal is that I would prefer to guard against pathologizing other groups (e.g. religious conservatives) in any attempt to find such a personality variable. For one, I think it might show our fields bias rather than being purely objective…Who is to say where patriotism ends and collective narcissism begins? Why don’t we see research where environmentalism is correlated with anti-corporation bias, which I’m sure is somewhat true…Secondly, I think it causes the opposite reaction in others than what we want…conservatives tune us out or circle their wagons and become even more conservative. Competition has it’s place as it leads to progress (e.g. better JPSP articles)…but it also has it’s downside too. One person’s need for structure is another person’s appreciation of tradition.
I’ll be sure to check out that test selection/indoctrination in competetiveness research too…maybe that would make a neat manipulation. If you have a reference for that, I’d love to know. Thanks.