Search results for: Community of Reason

2Brittany Shoots-Reinhard has a PhD in social psychology with a specialization in attitudes and persuasion, and judgment and decision making. She is also Foundation Beyond Belief’s Beyond Belief Network coordinator. This is the second post in series based on a talk Brittany recently gave for the Humanist Community of Central Ohio. As I mentioned in my last…

Brittany Shoots-Reinhard has a PhD in social psychology with a specialization in attitudes and persuasion, and judgment and decision making. She is also Foundation Beyond Belief’s Beyond Belief Network coordinator. This is the second post in a series based on a talk Brittany recently gave for the Humanist Community of Central Ohio.

As I mentioned in my last post, everyone sees the world in terms of groups they belong to and groups they don’t belong to. Groups we belong to (i.e., ingroups) get special treatment relative to outgroups, which is one reason why interfaith activities (or comment sections on blogs) can be challenging.

There are also some additional reasons why nonbelievers are so objectionable to believers that our very existence is “too controversial.” Social psychologists Will Gervais, Ara Norenzayan, and their colleagues have explored anti-atheist prejudice (e.g., Gervais, Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011) and find that distrust is the key factor in anti-atheist prejudice. To contrast, they find that disgust drives anti-gay prejudice.

One reason for the distrust could be that religious people assume that even though they are good because of their superior morals, the threat of eternal damnation is all that’s keeping those other jerks from raping and pillaging, making it religious illusory superiority with a moral flavor. You may have heard of another specific type of illusory superiority known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (e.g., Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Indeed, Gervais and colleagues (Gervais, Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011) found that distrust (and thus dislike) of atheists depended on the belief that people behave better when God is watching.

Another factor specific to nonbeliever-believer relationships is the fact that atheists’ existence really is psychologically threatening to believers. It seems ridiculous on the surface. According to Terror Management Theory (e.g., Greenberg, Solomon & Pyszczynski, 1997), humans cope with their fear of death by supporting a worldview that gives them hope for immortality. This can be symbolic immortality, (e.g., becoming famous, producing art or literature, or being remembered by one’s family) or literal immortality (e.g., going to heaven, being reincarnated). The existence of atheists is thus a threat to believers’ worldview and their hope for immortality. In contrast, the existence of Christians doesn’t threaten atheists’ and secular humanists’ paths toward symbolic immortality. So if it feels sometimes that the antipathy between theists and atheists is one-sided, it might be!

Finally, the moral flavor of religious beliefs can also contribute to anti-atheist discrimination. Religious beliefs are often held with a high degree of certainty and universalism (i.e., the belief is a moral imperative that everyone must conform to), which is known as moral conviction (e.g., Skitka, 2001). In fact, inducing people to perceive their attitudes as having moral bases is more likely to make them distance themselves socially, professionally, and physically from those who disagree with them (Skitka, Bauman & Sargis, 2005). Many atheists see their beliefs as a matter of personal preference, so even though they might still be held with certainty and strongly defended, they do not carry the same emotional weight and consequences for discrimination that beliefs do for theists.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’ll explore this more in a future post, but one possibility is changing the focus of interactions from beliefs to values. While beliefs between groups can differ widely, values, particularly the values of fairness, equality, charity, and kindness, are fairly universal. In experiments on Terror Management Theory and moral conviction, discrimination and prejudice depend upon the perception that the outgroup disagrees. Focusing on shared values limits this disagreement, and as a result could minimize discrimination, too. The focus on shared values is the impetus behind Foundation Beyond Belief Challenge the Gap program, which allows FBB members to support high-quality, non-proselytizing religious charities.

Brittany Shoots-Reinhard has a PhD in social psychology with a specialization in attitudes and persuasion, and judgment and decision making. She is also Foundation Beyond Belief’s Beyond Belief Network coordinator. This is the first post in series based on a talk Brittany recently gave for the Humanist Community of Central Ohio.

One of the challenges of being a nonbeliever is being accepted by your friends and family; occasionally atheist groups find that their service or donations are unwanted by an organization. In fact, psychologists (e.g., Gervais et al., 2011) have found that atheists are a particularly disliked and distrusted group, even by liberal Christians. While our gut response may be derision for those irrational religious types, it’s good to keep in mind that prejudice and stereotypes are ubiquitous and a preference for one’s own group is fairly inevitable.

People have a tendency to see the world in terms of social categories and favoring the categories they belong to. Research on minimal groups shows us that even something as unimportant as preference for one abstract artist over another (e.g., Tajfel, Billig, et al., 1971; Brewer & Silver, 1978) is enough to create preferential treatment for one’s ingroup. Once someone identifies with an ingroup, favoritism is highly likely (Brewer, 1979). People with defensive self-esteem (those who report having high self-esteem when asked, but appear to have low self-esteem on more automatic measures) are especially likely to show ingroup favoritism (e.g., Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, et al., 2003).

People want to be members of the best group; not only will they favor their own groups, they gravitate toward successful groups. Identification with a group can depend on the group’s recent success or failure. In a famous demonstration of this concept, Cialdini and colleagues (1976) at universities all over the United States showed that students were more likely to use the word “we” to refer to their college team following a win, but the team became “they” following a loss. They observed a similar pattern for wearing team apparel: People wear team clothes to link themselves to a successful team, but not an unsuccessful team. This “Basking in Reflected Glory” can make people feel better about themselves.

If you think that we do great work, using an FBB mug or joining might just make you feel better about yourself, too.

In addition to being more identified with successful groups, people remind themselves of worse groups when they feel bad about themselves. For example, people are more likely to discriminate or express prejudice when they feel threatened. Sometimes people directly derogate the source of negative feedback, if a negative stereotype exists (e.g., Sinclair & Kunda, 1999). Other times, the target of bias is unrelated to the self-threat (e.g., Fein & Spencer, 1997). Either way, derogating an outgroup can protect self-esteem.

We often focus on the downside of ingroup favoritism, but there’s really nothing wrong with identifying with a group per se. While we want to fight discrimination and prejudice, we should encourage people to identify with groups that have positive goals. People are influenced by the norms and goals of their groups as they become incorporated into them (e.g., Moreland & Levine, 1982), so encouraging people to join (and identify) with groups like Foundation Beyond Belief can make the world a better place for believers and nonbelievers alike.

This post comes from AJ Chalom, Foundation Beyond Belief’s humanist giving program coordinator and an active member of the Society for Humanistic Judaism.

In May, I was asked as a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Humanistic Judaism (SHJ) to endorse Foundation Beyond Belief and encourage our communities to participate. I affirmed, and hoped people would participate, but was not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the project. I hadn’t found a reason to walk.

In June, I found myself working for FBB as an intern. One of my jobs was to encourage new teams to register during our registration week, so I encouraged my own Humanistic Jewish community, Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation, to join the effort, and I signed up my family and pledged to “fundraise”. But I hadn’t found a reason to walk.

Sam became my reason. Sam is six. He goes to my daughter’s school, and in June he was diagnosed with leukemia. While I didn’t know his family well, we have many of the same friends, and I started following the daily trials and tribulations of having a child with leukemia through the family’s blog. They are inspiring. They have handled adversity with humor, strength, flexibility, and truth. While they are not humanists, their actions are, and I admire them. Sam is my reason to walk.

But fundraise? Ask people for money? Everyone dreads it. I decided to just do it. I sent 80 emails, 20 for each member of the family, to personal friends. I made the emails personal, asking them each to give what they could, and the donations came rolling in. I raised my goal from $100 to $250 to $500 as I raised more money. I raised my children’s goals from $100 to $250 as their friends’ families contributed.

One of my son’s 5-year-old friends got out his piggy bank and found $2.50 in it. He volunteered to donate it to the effort, so his 3-year-old sister matched his $2.50, along with their parents. We received a $10 bill in his school folder the next week.

All the fundraising had stalled when Light the Night Illinois reminded me that the walk was 20 days away. They said, if I raised just $12.50 every day, I would raise another $250 before the walk. Really? Is it that easy? So I found some of the heroes photos on their Facebook page and shared them on my Facebook timeline, with my network, asking for just $12.50 from one friend every day. I learned people are generous – just ask.

My family turned a fictional goal of raising $400 into actual donations of more than $1,200, all of which will be matched through the generosity of Foundation Beyond Belief and the Steifel Freethought Foundation.

I walk because of Sam, I fundraise because people are generous, I give for science, research, and family support in the face of cancer and illness–all of these reasons are at the core of my own humanist values.

Todd Stiefel is a big name in the secular community, known especially for his philanthropic work. He is the president and founder of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization that has donated more than $3.5 million to secular charities. The Stiefel family has pledged to match the first $500,000 Foundation Beyond Belief teams raise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Light the Night walks. So it is with great pleasure that we give you Todd’s own explanation, in conjunction with Robb Taylor, about his personal connection to this important work. (Transcript below the video.)