I admit that I’m biased, but I feel that the contents of this video make a great deal of intuitive sense. The more I’ve understood about evolution, and about my literal kinship with all other life on this planet, the more I’ve felt that kinship, including with my fellow humans. That said, there are definitely people (Richard Dawkins come to mind) who almost certainly know more about evolution than I do, and yet manage to persevere with their bigotry anyway. As always, we’re talking about statistical likelihood, not a universal truth. You’ll find the video and the transcript at the link above, or you can watch the video here:
I definitely have a lot of doubts and misgivings about this idea. The main one is that correlation and causation would be just about impossible to tease apart, wouldn’t they? Once upon a time I would have thought that atheism was a cure for culturally christian prejudices but that’s been disproven to an extreme by the dickdawk side of the rift.
Education in general seems to improve people’s chances of taking a more nuanced view of the world, but how do you decide which subjects are responsible for that, if it’s possible at all? And let’s say you live in a state that’s brave enough to teach evolution in K-12 education. How much of your cultural liberalism is a result of that, and how much just comes from living in an environment less drenched in hateful propaganda?
Maybe those issues are addressed in the video but I don’t feel like turning off my watch history and don’t want to infect my recs with atheo-skeptic content.
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You can just read the transcript as a regular text article: https://skepchick.org/2022/02/why-those-who-understand-evolution-are-less-likely-to-be-bigots/
and while this particular study focused on evolution, it’s really the “kinship with all life” part that seems to be relevant in, well, having empathy.