Researchers compared levels of aggression (measured in a test where participants get to blast each other with loud noises) between students at Brigham Young University (99% True Believers) and Vrije University in Amsterdam (50% God-Wallopers). They also compared aggression after reading a quotation that enjoined them to “take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the LORD”. The results: getting God’s permission increases levels of aggression.
The research sheds light on the possible origins of violent religious fundamentalism and falls in line with theories proposed by scholars of religious terrorism, who hypothesize that exposure to violent scriptures may induce extremists to engage in aggressive actions. “To the extent religious extremists engage in prolonged, selective reading of the scriptures, focusing on violent retribution toward unbelievers instead of the overall message of acceptance and understanding,” writes Bushman “one might expect to see increased brutality.”
Well, OK, but I’ve read substantial parts of the bible, and there is no overall message of acceptance and understanding. The overall message is that you will be rewarded for obedience and the Other will be tormented brutally. And at least in American religion, the poetry and bits about tolerance are downplayed to give more time to the hellfire and worldly imperialism bits.
Hmm, I saw this story, and then God commanded you to give me some $$$, but it didnt work… Bummer.. Guess is only works with murder..
Testosterone & adrenaline excited by commands from a dictator deity = carnage. Sounds about right to me.
+++
It’s obvious what we need to do. We need to ban the Bible from libraries. And take those religious channels off the air. THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Vrije = free. It looks weird to mix languages like that.
I’ve read the whole thing – and concur with your assessment. NB The Koran/Quran is no better.
About 25 years ago we spent an entire year reading through and studying the bible. Even the Brothers thought most of it was bovine effluent, but they had to teach it.
If anything made me more cynical it had to be studying that book. Obedience to a sky fairy? Please, couldn’t they come up with something better?
Should stop by the old place and see what they’re teaching these days. Probably not going through the whole bible, that much is given.
“I didn’t so much like the latter part of the book, which is more like preachy talking than fighting and the old in-out. I liked the parts where these old Yahoodies tolchok each other and drink their Hebrew vino, and getting into the bed with their wives’ handmaidens. That kept me going. . . .”
Yeah, but how much of that difference in aggression is a result of being American versus being Dutch?
Beth has a point there. The Dutch are always huge appeasers, unwilling to break the peace no matter what the cost (even if this implies being subservient).
Also remarkable is that the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a Christian university in origin.
One wonders about some sort of a residual effect of religion in the supposedly atheist Dutch students:
Although Vrije students were less likely to be influenced by the source of the material, they blasted more aggressively when the passage that they read included the sanctioning of the violence by God. This finding held true even for non-believers, though to a lesser extent.
The lesser amount of aggression might be expected in a society with less exposure to violence, however one also might expect that “true non-believers” to be unaffected by God-sanctioned revenge.
Of course, the Biblical passage inciting violence increased aggression among non-believers too.
Well, kidding or not, the text itself isn’t really the problem. It’s the teaching of the text that’s the problem, and that’s what needs to change. We don’t ban stuff about The Flat Earth Society; we just don’t give a shit.
You wanna see the bible? Sure, go for it. But just remember the background for it…
Oh come on, guys. Much as it’s fun to bash fundies, this article is a load of crap. There are a bunch of vast, gaping holes:
1. We have no idea how large the increase in agression was. We have no information on the size of the study, and hence the statistical significance of the findings.
2. There’s no evidence at all that the increase in agression was due to religion specifically in the case of God sancifying violence statement. There was an increase in violence because we have a shift from a passage describing violence to one encouraging it. The study seemed to involve no controls – logically, one could attain the same effect of increased aggression with any secular text. I mean, obviously, giving rousing speeches before battle works to improve the morale of troops. The rationalising of the contrary evidence that secular students are equally affected as ‘oh maybe they aren’t really secular’ is an absurd attempt to squeeze past the evidence.
3. There’s big cultural differences between the two groups – indeed, big linguistic differences, as stated. This does not appear to be controlled for at all.
And really, PZ’s assertion that there is no message of tolerance etc in the bible is very unneccessary. Do we really need such divisiveness? Haven’t we learned from the IDiots to avoid ‘proofs by personal incomprehension’? How would we approach an IDiot reading the Origin of Species and finding it to be filled with racist hatred? Laugh, presumeably.
Let’s judge theists on what they actually say and do, instead of what *we* think they should believe based on our personal images of what their scripture says. Reading and interpreting the bible is not a science. There is no one correct answer, and we should not seat ourself upon thrones as armchair theologians to dictate canon that we ourselves don’t believe in.
One of the many things that gets me about the Bible is the not suffering a witch to live bit, combined with the complete lack of defining what a witch is.
So it’s ordering the reader to kill, but not being very clear on what to kill.
That’s just incompetently written instructions, I say.
And really, PZ’s assertion that there is no message of tolerance etc in the bible is very unnecessary.
What he said was that there was no overall message of tolerance, not that the bible never encourages tolerance.
PZ said that ‘The overall message is that you will be rewarded for obedience and the Other will be tormented brutally’.
And I know a lot of christians who would disagree with that.
You need to read the article more carefully.
They took the same bible passage and told some subjects it was from the bible and some that it was simply an “old archaelogical find” and found differences based solely on what they were told the source was Thus they are comparing exactly what you accusing them of overlooking.
And while it would be nice if media articles like these gave you a bit more to chew on in terms of stats and effect sizes, if it wasn’t statistically significant, it wouldn’t have been published. Personally, the thing I don’t like about these studies is that I never really buy their measure of aggression – but you do what you can.
And everyone in Amsterdam speaks fluent English, so I’m not sure the point there.
I smell concern troll.
I objected to this experiment when it was used to demonstrate the evils of video games, so I think I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t speak up just the same now. I am not a psychologist, but I cannot see how one could overlook the confounds in an experiment like this.
Humans are aggressive by nature. It does not take much to bring that out. An experiment such as this both encourages aggression and provides a safe framework within which to express that aggression. The Milgrim experiment demonstrated that all it takes is an instruction from an experimenter in a white coat to convince people to take actions they believe are genuinely harming another human being. The level of transgression elicited in the present experiment is much lower, since the “harm” is experienced equally by all participants, and due to modern ethical standards, is well known by all participants to be within objectively safe limits. Thus subjects may feel free to act out within the framework of the experiment, without revealing anything about tendencies towards genuine transgressive violence.
A game of basketball increases aggressive response, but we do not suggest that the competitive aggression encouraged by the sport indicates an increased tendency towards violent actions, much less that basketball should be eliminated as something that undermines the mores of society, as has been claimed for video games, and now for religion.
That a religious exhortation towards aggression works better with believers than with nonbelievers is unsurprising. I do not care for basketball; therefore, the above-mentioned increase in aggression does not generally apply to me personally. This is also unsurprising. Telling a group of atheists that they should be willing to stand up and defend the legitimacy of their nonbelief in a society that oppresses them would also probably have a measurable effect. No shock there either. Again, it’s the people who are aggressive, qua people, and they will take their rationalizations where they find them.
It might indeed be the case that religion (or video games, or basketball) is a special case of incitement that makes its users more likely to cross the line from everyday social-dominance sorts of aggression into genuinely transgressive sociopathic forms of aggression, but this class of experiment does not appear to demonstrate that, or anything terribly interesting.
>>>There is no overall message of acceptance and understanding (in the Bible).
True, yes, but the Bible is the ultimate Rorschach test: what’s actually in it is irrelevant compared to what people choose take out of it. That being said, a depressing majority of believers seem to use the Bible primarily as a resource for justifying their own douchebaggery. Quakers (or at least the several Quakers I have known) would seem to be a notable exception, and I can’t help but wonder how they, for example, would have performed in this study.
It’s not a surprising conclusion. Religionists are always telling us that you can’t have morality without belief in God, etc., etc., so it stands to reason that a God-given exemption from moral behavior would be given credence; who else but God could waive what God otherwise mandates? Why, if God told you to kill your only child, wouldn’t you immediately obey? Of course! We’re supposed to honor Abraham for his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Gullible bastard.
FhnuZoag, I don’t mean to be an ass, but if you’re going to pretend to know something about how to evaluate psychological research, at least recognize that a study published in a peer reviewed journal will almost certainly have statistically significant results. Also, while I know these dopes are accepting the conclusions of the study without reading it, it’s a really bad idea to criticize it without reading it. And since the study is readily available on the web, there’s no reason not to read it if you want to drawn conclusions from it. If you’re too lazy to look, it’s right here:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbushman/God07.pdf
The study itself is at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbushman/God07.pdf
“They took the same bible passage and told some subjects it was from the bible and some that it was simply an “old archaelogical find” and found differences based solely on what they were told the source was Thus they are comparing exactly what you accusing them of overlooking.”
But did that mean that they did it because of religion, or because it was something that they did not have a cultural reference point to? Compare, for example, an article detailing Vietnam from an american POV to one of a conflict in which the identities of the involved are anonymised, where A just did whatever with B. In one, there is an obvious side which we are supposed to favour, and in the other, there is not. The bible connotation may have an effect just because we are aware of the context, and so we read the story as a narrative with a good guy and a bad guy. Nothing to do with religion.
From the article, the significance level was 0.04. That’s not very good. Secondly, there are wide cultural connotations involved in suggesting a source detailing an occurance of violence is from an archeological dig with an Arabic name to a bunch of conservative americans.
The study found that for ‘God sanctioned violence’, aggression was raised even if the source was given as an archeological dig – this is not mentioned in the article. Attempting to distinguish between the two gives a probability of 0.06 – a value that is considered to be *insignificant*.
“And everyone in Amsterdam speaks fluent English, so I’m not sure the point there.”
But the dutch speak English as a second language, whilst the Americans speak it as their first. Was the passage given to the Dutch students in English, or in Dutch? If the former, there may well be a psychological difference between how immersed one can be in a non-native language text. If the latter, how do we know the difference cannot be accounted for by translation error.
To come to the conclusion the article requests, the only difference we assume between the two groups of students is their religion. This is a very dubious assumption to make of two groups with different nationalities.
Hmm, oops, timing. But in any case, just to explain about significance a bit, the p=? values quoted are the probability of the measured values occuring if the hypothesis was false. A normal bound on this significance value is 0.05, though some disciplines require more.
On this measure stick, we have:
BYU students difference between bible and not bible: 0.04, slightly significant.
BYU students difference between sanctified and not sanctified: 0.09. Not significant
BYU male > female: 0.001 significant
VU students sanctioned vs not sanctioned (by any God, not neccessarily the biblical god): 0.001 significant
VU students agressive because of combination of sanctioned and religousity: 0.05 not significant
VU students agressive because of God of the bible vs God of archeology: 0.06 not significant
FhnuZoag seems to be using “significant” as simply an English vocabulary word instead of as a term of art. When one says “0.06 not significant”, that simply means that a result is not regarded as statistically significant at the 5% (0.05) level. It would, however, be considered statistically significant at the 10% (0.10) level. And one does not say “0.04, slightly significant” — there’s no “slightly” about it. It is statistically significant at the 5% level.
All “significance” means in this context is the measure of a result’s unlikelihood. Most visitors here probably know this, but it bears clarification for those who don’t. A p value of 0.06 says that the research result could have been expected to occur “by accident” no more than 6% of the time. In other words, it’s not very likely (and if it’s not very likely, then you may well be on to something). Researchers today often prefer to give p values instead of falling into the language of significance levels, since that’s often in the eye of the beholder. In my area of education research, 5% is pretty standard. In medical research, I understand that a more stringent 1% is more common. In any case, however, we’re measuring the probably that a result is mere happenstance.
Hmm. Just got done reading a bunch of books roughly on geology, genetics and evolution (Ridley, Dawkins, Relethford, …), and I’m wondering if that’s the key to the dominance of religious beliefs amongst the populace. Maybe those pre-disposed to believe in god are better survivors because they’re more aggressive?
Oh, and maybe they direct most hostility towards the atheists, and not towards people of other faiths, because at the genetic level, that’s the real “enemy”??
Now there’s a thought…the religious kooks are the missing link between the chimps and us atheists! Hahahaha!
I used 5%, because 5% was the level implied in the study’s own analysis.
The results of the study are not entirely consistent with the hypothesis that sanctioning of the violence by God leads to more aggression in true believers.
If they were, one would expect that non-believers would not be influenced by such sanctioning. The fact that the non-believers were similarly influenced by the violent religious passages indicates that there is more going on.
Predisposed to believe in god?!
You mean, like, there’s a gene for gullibility?
FhnuZoag said:
While I’m sympathetic to your viewpoint on the paper, your statement is incorrect: a p-value in frequentist statistics is actually the probability that the data would occur if the null hypothesis were *true*, not false.
What a crappily conducted study! Have they not heard of the concept of appropriate experimental control. Maybe they should take research-design course.
Did it ever occur to them that any differences between the religious/nonreligous group might be due to the fact that they are from two completely different cultures!! This study tells us nothing about religion.
“Humans are aggressive by nature. It does not take much to bring that out. An experiment such as this both encourages aggression and provides a safe framework within which to express that aggression. The Milgrim experiment demonstrated that all it takes is an instruction from an experimenter in a white coat to convince people to take actions they believe are genuinely harming another human being. ”
I am a psychologist, and what is your evidence for your claim that humans are aggressive by nature. Psychologists such as marti seligman would disagree– he claims that humans are good by nature.
Your Milgrim experiment example doesn’t show that people are naturally aggressive. In fact this experiment could also be used to demonstrate that humans are cooperative by nature and want to please other people even if it means doing something that causes them emotional anguish (many of the participants in this study were extremely upset and showed many signs of distress but continued the study because they didn’t want to displease the researcher).
“When one says “0.06 not significant”, that simply means that a result is not regarded as statistically significant at the 5% (0.05) level. It would, however, be considered statistically significant at the 10% (0.10) level. ”
True, but in most areas of social science “alpha= .05” is the standard. .10 is too liberal.
Shouldn’t this article be posted on the “I Can’t Believe It’s Science Section”?
Don’t tell me that this was posted because someone here actually thinks that this article is credible??? If so, Myers, you might want to talk to some of your colleagues about how to conduct experiments!
Jone,
It’s not an either/or dichotomy. Human beings seem to possess innate dispositions to both aggressive/competitive behavior and also “good”/cooperative behavior. A person’s actual behavior at any given time and place will depend in part on which of these tendencies prevails in that particular situation. It’s a complex interplay of genes and environment.
I don’t think the Milgrim experiment demonstrates a disposition for aggression so much as a vulnerability to authority figures. It is quite shocking how easily people seem to be able to suppress empathy and compassion in certain situations.
Who has killed more human beings (millions and millions) than the atheistic nazis and communists in the 20th century?. It wasn’t religion at all. In the big scheme of things few people were actually killed by religionists.