Why do people hate people?

 

Biases against certain groups of people can escalate into acts of violence if left unchecked. Paul Taylor/Stone via Getty Images

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

---

Why do people hate people? – Daisy, age 9, Lake Oswego, Oregon

---

Have you ever said “I hate you” to someone? What about using the “h-word” in casual conversation, like “I hate broccoli”? What are you really feeling when you say that you hate something or someone?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word “hate” as an “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” All over the world, researchers like us are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psychology, sociology and many others.

If you had a scary experience with thunderstorms, you might say that you hate thunderstorms. Maybe you have gotten very angry at something that happened at a particular place, so now you say you hate going there. Maybe someone said something hurtful to you, so you say you hate that person.

Understanding hate as an emotional response can help you recognize your feelings about something or someone and be curious about where those feelings are coming from. This awareness will give you time to gather more information and imagine the other person’s perspective.

So what is hate and why do people hate? There are many answers to these questions.

What hate isn’t

Hate, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, “does not mean rage, anger or general dislike.”

Sometimes people think they have to feel or believe a certain way about another person or group of people because of what they hear or see around them. For example, people might say they hate another person or group of people when what they really mean is that they don’t agree with them, don’t understand them or don’t like how they behave or the things they believe in.

Do you hate this person, or are you angry, hurt or afraid? Lourdes Balduque/Moment via Getty Images

It is easy to blame others for things you don’t believe or experiences you don’t like. Think about times you might have heard someone at school say they hate a classmate or a teacher. Could they have been angry, hurt or confused about something but used the word hate to explain or name how they were feeling?

When you don’t understand someone else, it can make you nervous and even afraid. Instead of being curious about each other’s unique experiences, people may judge others for being different – they may have a different skin color, practice a different religion, come from a different country, be older or younger, or use a wheelchair.

When people judge people as being less important or less human than themselves, that is a form of hatred.

What hate is

The U.S. Department of Justice defines hate as “bias against people or groups with specific characteristics that are defined by the law.” These characteristics can include a person’s race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and national origin.

One way to think about hate is as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, hate is a feeling that grows from biased attitudes about others, like stereotypes that certain groups of people are animals, lazy or stupid.

Sometimes these biased attitudes and feelings provide a foundation for people to act out their biases, such as through bullying, exclusion or insults. For example, many Asian people in the U.S. experienced an increase in hate incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic. If communities accept biases as OK, some people may move up the pyramid and think it is also OK to discriminate, or believe that specific groups of people are not welcome in certain neighborhoods or jobs because of who they are.

Near the top of the pyramid, some people commit violence or hate crimes because they believe their own way of being is better than others’. They may threaten or physically harm others, or destroy property. At the very top of the pyramid is genocide, the intent to destroy a particular group – like what Jewish people experienced during World War II or what Rohingya people are experiencing today in Myanmar, near China.

Hate at the middle and higher levels of the pyramid happens because no one took action to discourage the biased feelings, attitudes and actions at the lower levels of the pyramid.

Taking action against hate

Not only can individual people hate, there are also hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan that attack people who are not white, straight or Christian. Sometimes hate has been written into law like the Indian Removal Act or Jim Crow laws that persecuted Native and Black Americans. If we stay silent when we encounter hate, that hatred can grow and do greater levels of harm.

There are many ways you can help stop hate in your everyday life.

Pay attention to what is being said around you. If the people you spend a lot of time with are saying hateful things about other groups, consider speaking up or changing who you hang out with and where. Be an upstander – sit with someone who is being targeted and report when you see or hear hate incidents.

Protests are one way people speak up on behalf of a specific group. FG Trade/E+ via Getty Images

Start noticing when you are letting hateful words or behaviors into your thoughts and actions. Get to know what hate looks and sounds like in yourself and in others, including what you see online.

Be open to meeting others who have different experiences than you and give them a chance to let you know who they are. Be brave and face your fears. Be curious and kind.

You are not alone in standing up to hate. Many human rights groups and government initiatives are doing the work of eradicating hate, too. We all have a “response-ability,” or the ability to respond. As civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

You just might find that it is easier to love other people than to hate them. Others will see how you behave and will follow your lead.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Kristine Hoover, Professor of Organizational Leadership, Gonzaga University and Yolanda Gallardo, Dean of Education, Gonzaga University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Newsrooms are experimenting with generative AI, warts and all

 

Journalists are using generative AI for tasks such as composing drafts and writing newsletters. Olena Koliesnik/iStock via Getty Images

The journalism industry has been under immense economic pressure over the past two decades, so it makes sense that journalists have started experimenting with generative AI to boost their productivity.

An Associated Press survey published in April 2024 asked journalists about the use of generative artificial intelligence in their work. Nearly 70% of those who responded said they had used these tools to generate text, whether it was composing article drafts, crafting headlines or writing social media posts.

A May 2024 global survey conducted by the public relations firm Cision found the slice to be somewhat smaller – 47% of journalists said they’d used generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard in their work.

But does the adoption of the technology pose any moral questions? After all, this is a business where professional ethics and public trust are especially important – so much so that there are fields of study devoted to it.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been researching the ethics of AI.

I think that if journalists are not careful about its deployment, the use of generative AI could undermine the integrity of their work.

How much time is really saved?

Let’s start with an obvious concern: AI tools are still unreliable.

Using them to research background for a story will often result in confident-sounding nonsense. During a 2023 demo, Google’s chatbot, Bard, famously spit out the wrong answer to a question about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It’s easy to imagine a journalist using the technology for background, only to end up with false information.

Therefore, journalists who use these tools for research will need to fact-check the outputs. The time spent doing that may offset any purported gains in productivity.

But to me, the more interesting questions have to do with using the technology to generate content. A reporter may have a good sense of what they want to compose, so they will ask an AI model to produce a first draft.

This may be efficient, but it also turns reporters from writers into editors, thus fundamentally altering the nature of what they do.

Plus, there’s something to be said for struggling to write a first draft from scratch and figuring out, along the way, whether the original idea that inspired it has merit. That’s what I am doing right now as I write this piece. And I’m sad to report that I discarded quite a few of the original arguments I wanted to make, because as I tried to articulate them, I realized that they didn’t work.

In journalism, as in art, generative AI emphasizes – indeed fetishizes – the moment in which an idea is conceived. It focuses on the original creative thought and relegates the tedious process of turning that thought into a finished product – whether it’s through outlining, writing or drawing – to a machine.

But the process of writing out a story is inseparable from the ideas that give rise to it. Ideas change and take shape as they are written out. They are not preexisting entities patiently floating around, perfectly formed, simply waiting to be translated into words and sentences.

AI’s undermining of a special relationship

To be fair, only a portion of the journalists in both surveys were using generative AI to compose drafts of articles. Instead, , such as writing newsletters, translating text, coming up with headlines or crafting social media posts.

Once journalists see that the AI is quite talented at writing – and it is getting better and better at it – how many of them will resist the temptation?

The fundamental question here is whether journalism involves anything more than simply conveying information to the public.

Does journalism also entail a kind of relationship between writers and their readers?

I think it does.

When a reader regularly follows the analysis of someone writing about the Middle East or about Silicon Valley, it is because they trust that writer, because they like that writer’s voice, because they have come to appreciate that writer’s thought process.

Now if journalism involves that kind of relationship, does the use of AI undermine it? Would I want to read journalism created by what amounts to an anonymized aggregation of the internet any more than I would want to read a novel created by an AI or listen to music composed by one?

Or, stated differently, if I read a piece of journalism or a novel or listened to a musical piece, which I thought was created by a human being, only to find out that it was largely generated by an AI, wouldn’t my appreciation or trust of the piece change?

If the practice of journalism is based on having this kind of relationship with the public, the increased use of AI may well undermine the integrity of the practice, particularly at a time when the industry is already dealing with trust issues.

Being a journalist is a noble calling that, at its best, helps sustain democratic institutions. I assume that this nobility still matters to journalists. But most readers probably would not trust AI to uphold the social role that journalism plays.

AI does not care that “democracy dies in darkness”; it does not care about speaking truth to power.

Yes, those are cliches. But they are also widely held precepts that sustain the trade. Journalists neglect them at their peril.

Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

From ancient Jewish texts to androids to AI, a just-right sequence of numbers or letters turns matter into meaning

 

The power of putting basic elements in just the right order is key to both Jewish mysticism and computer coding. WhataWin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction collection “I, Robot” tells the story of androids created at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. The androids range from “Robbie,” who is nonvocal, to “Stephen Byerley,” who may or may not be a robot – he is so humanlike that people can’t tell.

Yet each model is made of the same elementary components: the binary code of ones and zeros. The differences in behavior between the simplest robot and the most advanced one, nigh indistinguishable from a human being, is simply the sequence of these two digits.

All computer languages are ultimately rendered in ones and zeros, even artificial intelligence programs – today’s equivalent of “Stephen Byerley.” But though this technology is relatively new, the concept it’s hinged on is not.

The idea that rearranging elemental units just so can produce powerful, even seemingly magical results appears all around us. It manifests in everything from technology and science to religion and art – a pattern I focus on in my work about how literature intersects with science, technology, engineering and math.

Some of the examples of this pattern that I find most fascinating are also the most ancient: They come from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that first appeared in print in the 12th century C.E.

Building blocks of creation

Integral to Kabbalah is the notion that Hebrew letters are the building blocks of the cosmos. According to mystical interpretations of the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God brought the world into being by creating the alphabet, then assembled the earth and sky by recombining letters.

“God is portrayed as an architect and the Torah a blueprint in the creation of the world,” Jewish studies scholar Howard Schwartz writes in his book “Tree of Souls.” “The way the letters of the alphabet emerge and combine has an uncanny resemblance to the combining and recombining of strings of DNA.”

The letter aleph, often believed to symbolize the oneness of God. Ben Burton/BRBurton23/Pixabay

The “Sefer Yetzirah,” or “Book of Creation,” which Torah scholar Aryeh Kaplan called “the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts,” describes the Hebrew letters as having great power. In Rabbi Kaplan’s translation of and commentary on verse 2.2, God “engraved” the letters “out of nothingness,” then “permuted” them into different combinations and “weighed” them.

“Each letter represents a different type of information,” Kaplan wrote. “Through the various manipulations of the letters, God created all things.”

From mud to man

In Jewish storytelling, Hebrew letters’ sacred power can be manipulated into combinations that animate inanimate matter. Such is the case of one of the earliest humanoid robots or “androids” in literature: the golem, a manlike creature made of clay.

A scene from the German movie ‘The Golem: How He Came into the World,’ released in 1920.

While there are numerous versions of this Jewish legend, the notion that letters animate the golem is common to them all. The mass of molded earth becomes lifelike when its maker intones secret combinations of letters. Engraved on the golem’s forehead is the Hebrew word for truth, “אמת,” comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet – which Jewish tradition interprets to mean that truth is all-encompassing.

The golem sometimes helps the Jewish community, or sometimes wreaks havoc, depending on the story. But the golem also represents something bigger: With mystical knowledge, man imitates God’s act of creation.

To deanimate the creature, its maker must remove the first letter written on its forehead: א, or aleph, which represents the oneness of God. That leaves מת, the Hebrew word for “dead” – reflecting the Jewish tradition that there is no truth without God.

A sculpture of the golem made up of carvings of Jewish letters, by artist Joshua Abarbanel and displayed in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

‘Coding’ everywhere you look

Like the golem, robots, androids and even AI are powered with recombinations of elemental units. Instead of Hebrew letters, the units are ones and zeros. In both instances, the specific permutation makes all the difference – and all these creations have inspired speculative stories about what happens when familiar building blocks are rearranged.

The creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” arises as an assortment of body parts. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s “Crakers” are humans 2.0, bioengineered from reshuffled genes. In science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella “Seventy-Two Letters,” which draws from golem legends, dolls move according to the sequence of letters on a parchment placed in their backs.

Such patterns are not just the stuff of fiction, nor are they limited to computer science. Permutative “coding” is all around. Music notes are arranged to form a melody; gene sequences are combined to form an organism. In all living things – owls, geckos, people, roses – the instructions encased in DNA comprise recombinations of the same four nucleobase pairs.

The biological difference between a complex human and a simple bacterium is the order in which the nucleobase pairs are arranged. Hugo de Vries, a biologist working at the turn of the 20th century, observed that “the whole organic world is the result of innumerable different combinations and permutations of relatively few factors.”

Each rung on the DNA ‘ladder’ is made up of pairs of four base nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Martin Steinthaler/Moment via Getty Images

Power of sequence

Not all combinations “work” – neither in science nor in storytelling. In “On the Nature of Things,” a famous poem about philosophy and physics, the first-century Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus cautions that “we must not think that all particles can be linked together in all ways, for you would see monsters created everywhere, forms coming to being half man, half beast …”

Fantastical imaginings aside, the core idea stands: Not all permutations yield viable results. To put it in terms of modern biology, genes with certain combinations of the four nucleobase pairs would not lead to a functioning organism.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges explored similar ideas in “The Library of Babel,” a short story about a library-like universe filled with books that contain every possible permutation of 25 characters. Most amount to nonsense – strings of letters that bear no meaning.

What sets apart something that works from something that doesn’t is sequence. The difference between the behavior of a simple robot like Asimov’s “Robbie” and the behavior of AI so complex that it seems sentient boils down to the sequence of ones and zeros that instruct it – not altogether dissimilar from the way a single letter is the difference between animation and deanimation, or creation and destruction, in Jewish folklore.

The potential consequences of AI’s novel permutation have caused fear and uncertainty. Yet perhaps there is some comfort in the notion that, as the Bible says, אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ: There’s nothing new under the sun.

Rocio Benabentos, Mark Finlayson and Mendel Hendel contributed feedback for this article.

Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor of English, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

How 19th-century Spiritualists ‘canceled’ the idea of hell to address social and political concerns

 

A majority of Americans believe that hell exists. Hayden Schiff from Cincinnati, USA via Wikimedia Commons., CC BY

Between Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, drivers pass a billboard on Interstate 71 that has achieved some internet fame.

Since 2004, a black sign has risen from this flat stretch of highway declaring “HELL IS REAL.” The H in “Hell” is painted in red, a color Christians have long associated with sin and Satan.

The developer who erected the warning, Jimmy Harston, has similar signs scattered across the Midwest, including ones that ask, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?”

For years, this confrontational sign was mostly a local attraction. But it gained wider notoriety when Ohio’s two Major League Soccer teams, Columbus Crew and FC Cincinnati, dubbed their 2017 matchup “Hell is Real.” The sign has now spawned TikTok content, T-shirt designs, mugs and decals. But it also reflects a genuine belief in hell held by a majority of Americans today, though the numbers are slipping.

A 2023 Gallup poll found that 59% of respondents believe in hell, while 67% believe in heaven. The numbers for hell belief are far higher among those who identify as Protestant Christians (81%) and Republicans (79%).

Hell belief is holding steady in the U.S., but this was not always the case. In my research on spirit communication in 19th century American culture, I have found an organized effort to “cancel” hell by Spiritualists, who made up the fastest-growing religious movement of the century.

Spiritualists believed that people could maintain communication with the living even after death. They thought communicative spirits had a principal role to play in addressing the era’s most pressing social and political concerns, which would be impossible if souls were damned. This idea was a cornerstone of their practice and a driver of their politics.

Hell hath no fury

Many traditions, including Catholic Christianity, have beliefs about eternal destiny, but Protestant beliefs predominated in America’s settler colonies.

Puritan minister Michael Wigglesworth’s epic and best-selling poem “Day of Doom,” written in 1666, scared generations of believers with its vivid depiction of “yonder Lake,/where Fire and Brimstone flameth.”

A century later, revivalist minister Jonathan Edwards warned of the “dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God” awaiting the unrepentant.

On the edges of organized religion, though, were believers interested in alternative afterlives. Swedish theologian and scientist Emmanuel Swedenborg, for example, speculated in 1758 that “The world of spirits is not heaven, nor is it hell; but it is a place or state intermediate between the two.”

Swedenborg’s ideas gained public traction in the U.S. after sisters Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, reported “rapping” and “knocking” sounds in their home. The knocking seemed responsive to the sisters’ questions, and they soon claimed that they could hold conversations with the deceased. Rising from this domestic drama was a national and international phenomenon that recalibrated people’s relationship with death and offered a balm to the grieving.

Some of the Foxes’ first advocates were Quaker activists Isaac and Amy Post. Isaac Post became a writing medium, recording alleged spirit communications from luminaries like George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte and also everyday people.

An 1841 painting ‘Pandemonium’ by John Martin, based on John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ where Pandemonium is the capital of Hell. John Martin via Wikimedia Commons

Spiritualists held that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey. A spirit’s assignment was to help those still in their bodies to create a better, more just world. Through mediums, séances and object manipulation, spirits were believed to be able to enlighten the living by giving them a glimpse into life on a broader plane of existence.

Spiritualists felt that embodied life was narrow and full of biases, wants, needs and conflicts. In his 1850 book, “Singular Revelations,” spirit medium Eliab W. Capron recorded an insight he claimed to receive from the spirit of radical Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow, who had died 14 years prior: “The Presbyterians say hell is a place of fire and brimstone that burns the soul forever. This is not so. The Hell is man’s own body, and when he escapes from that he escapes from bondage.”

Fires of reform

In neutralizing the threat of hell, Spiritualists believed that even deeply corrupted spirits could spur the living toward progressive reforms.

In an 1858 gathering of self-described “friends of free thought” in Vermont known as the Rutland Free Convention, Spiritualists and social reformers debated the question of hell vis-a-vis issues like slavery, the death penalty and maternity.

Lecturer and clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis cheekily announced to the Rutland crowd, “Hell has undergone the most extensive alterations and improvements” in the hands of Spiritualists. By caring “less about the fear of the devil, and more about the actual necessity of goodness,” people could act expediently to address real social problems rather than fight what Davis considered imaginary ones.

Spirit medium Achsa Sprague. vtdigger/via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit medium Ascha Sprague linked hell belief to the persistence of capital punishment in American jurisprudence, asking, “Who blames man that he hangs his brother between heaven and earth, when he has been taught to believe that the Almighty God, infinite in power and wisdom, will in a moment plunge him into a burning pit, and save him never?”

In other words, Spiritualists warned that the idea of hell allowed people to remain complacent: Let hell punish the brutal enslaver, the cruel prison warden, the merciless factory foreman, the abusive husband. Hell gave believers a way to escape the responsibility of addressing burning social ills in the here and now. By relinquishing the “bottomless pit, which they have been taught to believe in,” Isaac Post quoted a spirit saying, a new ethos of urgent and sweeping reform could materialize.

Even today, some spiritual activists consider hell belief an impediment to systemic social change. For example, prison abolitionist Hannah Bowman wrote in a 2023 collection on spirituality and abolition, “Insofar as hell is defined by coercion/confinement, separation, and retribution, it is to some degree related to any societal and state interventions reliant upon those practices.”

To hell and back

Putting out the fires of hell was not easy in the 19th century U.S., especially at the outbreak of the Civil War when mass death fed apocalyptic rhetoric. The promise of God’s “terrible swift sword” of judgment was sung out in the canonical words of suffragist Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Spiritualism’s popularity waxed and waned after the war, and its reformist leanings largely faded. Mass casualty events like war and flu led to periodic revivals, especially of séance culture. But hell belief in America ultimately held steady and reignited by the middle of 20th century.

The reasons for this range from a decline in religious belief between the world wars to a religious revival following them, and the horrors of war itself. In his 1949 memoir, “To Hell and Back,” World War II 2nd Lt. Audie Murphy recounts a fellow soldier’s impromptu verses; “Oh, gather round me comrades and listen while / I speak / Of a war, a war, a war, where hell is six feet deep.” Hell was everywhere.

Cornell University’s Roper Center poll from 1957 – in the thick of the Cold War – found that 74% of Americans polled believed in an afterlife, but 84% felt that the dead were uncommunicative. These modern trends indicate that hell belief captures the zeitgeist of an era. It ebbs and flows along with attitudes about justice, human suffering and even the health of the planet.

The “Hell is Real” sign has experienced a similar flux. Last summer, street artist LISP pasted a cutout of a cartoonish red devil on the highway sign and shared the covert operation on Instagram. “Is nothing sacred?” one user asked, riffing on the sign’s iconic, if peculiar, status. The sign has since been replaced with a fresh one, a visible reminder that for some people, hell belief will never die.

Lindsay DiCuirci, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The number of religious ‘nones’ has soared, but not the number of atheists – and as social scientists, we wanted to know why

 

Fewer people are affiliated with religion in the United States, but that hardly means that they’re all atheists. Anthony Bradshaw/Photographer's Choice RF via Getty Images

The number of individuals in the United States who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown dramatically in recent years, and “the nones” are now larger than any single religious group. According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5% of the U.S. population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is around 30% today.

At first glance, some might assume this means nearly 1 in 3 Americans are atheists, but that’s far from true. Indeed, only about 4% of U.S. adults identify as an atheist.

As sociologists who study religion in the U.S., we wanted to find out more about the gap between these percentages and why some individuals identify as an atheist while other unaffiliated individuals do not.

Many shades of ‘none’

The religiously unaffiliated are a diverse group. Some still attend services, say that they are at least somewhat religious, and express some level of belief in God – although they tend to do these things at a lower rate than individuals who do identify with a religion.

There is even diversity in how religiously unaffiliated individuals identify themselves. When asked their religion on surveys, unaffiliated responses include “agnostic,” “no religion,” “nothing in particular,” “none” and so on.

Only about 17% of religiously unaffiliated people explicitly identify as “atheist” on surveys. For the most part, atheists more actively reject religion and religious concepts than other religiously unaffiliated individuals.

Our recent research examines two questions related to atheism. First, what makes an individual more or less likely to identify as an atheist? Second, what makes someone more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview over time?

Beyond belief – and disbelief

Consider the first question: Who’s likely to identify as an atheist. To answer that, we also need to think about what atheism means in the first place.

Not all religious traditions emphasize belief in a deity. In the U.S. context, however, particularly within traditions such as Christianity, atheism is often equated with saying that someone does not believe in God. Yet in one of our surveys we found that among U.S. adults who say “I do not believe in God,” only about half will select “atheist” when asked their religious identity.

In other words, rejecting a belief in God is by no means a sufficient condition for identifying as an atheist. So why do some individuals who do not believe in God identify as an atheist while others do not?

Our study found that there are a number of other social forces associated with the likelihood of an individual identifying as an atheist, above and beyond their disbelief in God – particularly stigma.

Many Americans eye atheists with suspicion and distaste. Notably, some social science surveys in the U.S. include questions asking about how much tolerance people have for atheists alongside questions about tolerance of racists and communists.

This stigma means that being an atheist comes with potential social costs, especially in certain communities. We see this dynamic play out in our data.

Political conservatives, for instance, are less likely to identify as an atheist even if they do not believe in God. Just under 39% of individuals identifying as “extremely conservative” who say they do not believe in God identify as an atheist. This compares with 72% of individuals identifying as “extremely liberal” who say they do not believe in God.

We argue that this likely is a function of greater negative views of atheists in politically conservative circles.

Adopting atheism

Stating that one does not believe in God, however, is the strongest predictor of identifying as an atheist. This leads to our second research question: What factors make someone more or less likely to lose their belief over time?

In a second survey-based study, from a different representative sample of nearly 10,000 U.S. adults, we found that about 6% of individuals who stated that they had some level of belief in God at age 16 moved to saying “I do not believe in God” as an adult.

Who falls into this group is not random.

Our analysis finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the stronger an individual’s belief in God was at age 16, the less likely they are to have adopted an atheistic worldview as an adult. For instance, fewer than 2% of individuals who said that “I knew God really existed and I had no doubts about it” as a teenager adopted an atheistic worldview later on. This compares with over 20% of those who said that “I didn’t know whether there was a God and I didn’t believe there was any way to find out” when they were 16.

However, our analysis reveals that several other factors make one more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview.

Regardless of how strong their teenage belief was, for instance, Black, Asian and Hispanic Americans were less likely to later identify as an atheist than white individuals. All else being equal, the odds of individuals in these groups adopting an atheistic worldview was about 50% to 75% less than the odds for white individuals. In part, this could be a product of groups that already face stigma related to their race or ethnicity being less able or willing to take on the additional social costs of being an atheist.

On the other hand, we find that adults with more income – regardless of how strong their belief was at 16 – are more likely to adopt the stance that they do not believe in God. Each increase from one income level to another on an 11-point scale increases the odds of adopting an atheistic worldview by about 5%.

This could be a function of income providing a buffer against any stigma associated with holding an atheistic worldview. Having a higher income, for instance, may give an individual the resources needed to avoid social circles and situations where being an atheist might be treated negatively.

However, there may be another explanation. Some social scientists have suggested that both wealth and faith can provide existential security – the confidence that you are not going to face tragedy at any moment – and therefore a higher income reduces the need to believe in supernatural forces in the first place.

Such findings are a powerful reminder that our beliefs, behaviors and identities are not entirely our own, but often shaped by situations and cultures in which we find ourselves.

Christopher P. Scheitle, Associate Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University and Katie Corcoran, Associate Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

As humans, we all want self-respect – and keeping that in mind might be the missing ingredient when you try to change someone’s mind

 

Looking to persuade someone? Start with respect. dusanpetkovic/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Why is persuasion so hard, even when you have facts on your side?

As a philosopher, I’m especially interested in persuasion – not just how to convince someone, but how to do it ethically, without manipulation. I’ve found that one of the deepest insights comes from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a focus of my research, who was born 300 years ago: April 22, 1724.

In his final book on ethics, “The Doctrine of Virtue,” Kant writes that each of us has a certain duty when we try to correct others’ beliefs. If we think they’re mistaken, we shouldn’t dismiss them as “absurdities” or “poor judgment,” he says, but must suppose that their views “contain some truth.”

What Kant is describing might sound like humility – just recognizing that other people often know things we don’t. But it goes beyond that.

This moral duty to find truth in others’ mistakes is based on helping the other person “preserve his respect for his own understanding,” Kant claims. In other words, even when we encounter obviously false points of view, morality calls on us to help the person we’re talking to maintain their self-respect – to find something reasonable in their views.

This advice can come across as patronizing, as though we were supposed to treat other adults like children with fragile egos. But I think Kant is onto something important here, and contemporary psychology can help us see it.

The need for respect

Imagine that you had to postpone lunch because of a meeting. With only 15 minutes to spare and a growling stomach, you leave to get a burrito.

On your way, however, you run into a colleague. “I’m glad to see you,” they say. “I’m hoping to change your mind about something from the meeting.”

In that scenario, your colleague has little chance of persuading you. Why? Well, you need food, and they’re getting in the way of you satisfying that need.

As psychologists of persuasion have long recognized, a key factor in persuasion is attention, and people don’t attend to persuasive arguments when they have more pressing needs – especially hunger, sleep and safety. But less obvious needs can also make people unpersuadable.

No, I really don’t to hear your ‘quick idea’ – not until I have some food in me, anyway. Jose Luis Pelaez/Stone via Getty Images

One that has received a lot of attention in recent decades is the need for social belonging.

The psychologist Dan Kahan gives the example of somebody who, like everyone in their community, incorrectly denies the existence of climate change. If that person publicly corrected their beliefs, they might be ostracized from friends and family. In that case, Kahan suggests, it can be “perfectly rational” for them to simply ignore the scientific evidence about an issue that they can’t directly affect, in order to satisfy their social need for connection.

This means that a respectful persuader needs to take into account others’ need for social dignity, such as by avoiding public settings when discussing topics that might be sensitive or taboo.

… and self-respect

Yet external needs, like hunger or social acceptance, aren’t the only ones that get in the way of persuasion. In a classic 1988 article on self-affirmation, the psychologist Claude Steele argued that our desire to maintain some “self-regard” as a good, competent person profoundly shapes psychology.

In more philosophical terms: People have a need for self-respect. This can explain why, for instance, students sometimes blame low grades on bad luck and difficult material, but explain high grades in terms of their own ability and effort.

Steele’s approach has yielded some surprising results. For example, one study invited female students to write down values that were important to them – an exercise in self-affirmation. Afterward, many students who had done this exercise earned higher grades in a physics course, particularly girls who had previously performed worse than male students.

That study and many others illustrate how bolstering someone’s self-esteem can equip them to tackle intellectual challenges, including challenges to their personal beliefs.

With that in mind, let’s turn back to Kant.

Politics are personal

Recall Kant’s claim: When we encounter somebody with false beliefs, even absurdly false ones, we must help them preserve their respect for their own understanding by acknowledging some element of truth in their judgments. That truth could be a fact we’d overlooked, or an important experience they’d had.

Kant isn’t just talking about being humble or polite. He directs attention to a real need that people have – a need that persuaders have to recognize if they want to get a fair hearing.

For example, say that you want to change your cousin’s mind about whom to support in the 2024 election. You come equipped with well-crafted evidence and carefully choose a good moment for a one-on-one talk.

Despite all that, your chances will be slim if you ignore your cousin’s need for self-respect. In a country as polarized as the U.S. is today, an argument about whom to vote for can feel like a direct attack on someone’s competence and moral decency.

In today’s climate, political conversations can feel like attacks on your character, not the politician’s. Goran 13/iStock via Getty Images

So providing somebody with evidence that they should change their views can run headfirst into their need for self-respect – our human need to see ourselves as intelligent and good.

Moral maturity

Persuasion, in other words, takes a lot of juggling: In addition to making strong persuasive arguments, a persuader also has to avoid threatening the other person’s need for self-respect.

Actual juggling would be a lot easier if we could slow down the objects. That’s why juggling on the Moon would be about twice as easy as on Earth, thanks to the Moon’s lower gravity.

When it comes to persuasion, though, we can slow things down by pacing the conversation, opening up time to learn something from the other person in return. This signals that you take them seriously – and that can bolster their self-esteem.

To be ethical, this openness to learning must be sincere. But that’s not hard: On most topics, each of us have limited experience. For example, perhaps Donald Trump or Joe Biden validated some of your cousin’s frustrations about their local government, in ways you couldn’t have guessed.

This approach has an important benefit to you as well: helping you preserve your own self-respect. After all, approaching others with humility shows moral maturity. Recognizing others’ need for self-respect can not only help you persuade someone, but persuade in ways you can feel proud of.

Colin Marshall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The biblical character who goes ‘down the rabbit hole’ into an alternate reality − just like Alice in Wonderland

 

Stained glass designed by Geoffrey Webb depicts Lewis Carroll’s characters in All Saints Church in Daresbury, Cheshire, England. Peter I. Vardy/Wikimedia Commons

R

The Bible’s Book of Job opens on an ordinary day in the land of Uz, where a man carefully performs religious rituals to protect his children. This routine has never failed Job, who is described as the most righteous person on the planet. But on this particular day, every one of his children is killed when a powerful wind brings down their house.

This makes no sense! Job did nothing wrong. Three friends visit Job and mourn with him. But an epic debate erupts when they claim that, if Job is the target of God’s wrath, it must have been deserved.

Job, on the other hand, says God has deprived him of justice and demands an explanation from the Almighty. He and his friends argue through poetry – a “rap battle” with beautiful imagery, eloquent wordplay and sarcastic insults.

Job mourns with his wife and friends. William Blake/The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons

The Book of Job is frequently touted as a literary masterpiece for the way it challenges foundational beliefs. Many stories have been written about characters like Job, thrust into a topsy-turvy world where nothing works the way it should. Suddenly, they must rethink their understanding about how the universe operates.

As a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, I see the closest parallels in another classic book – but perhaps not one you’d expect.

Down the rabbit hole

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” published in 1865, is a hallmark of children’s literature because of the way it encourages curiosity. Like the Book of Job, the novel upends literary conventions and mocks elders, teachers and religious leaders – really, anyone who tries to tell you that life will be OK if you stop asking questions and follow the rules.

It opens with a little girl named Alice, who is bored one afternoon until she sees a rabbit check its pocket watch and declare that it’s running late. She follows it down a rabbit hole and into Wonderland, a dreamlike place where cats vanish into thin air, babies turn into pigs and caterpillars smoke hookah.

Catching sight of the white rabbit is just the start of Alice’s unnerving adventures. John Tenniel/The British Library via Wikimedia Commons

Everyday logic no longer applies. Like Job, Alice must question her assumptions if she is to make sense of what is happening around her. Other fantasy worlds require swords, but Alice battles the fantastical creatures of Wonderland with words. As with Job, her ordinary day has gone upside-down, and she finds herself in a debate about reality.

Method to the madness?

Each of these books pushes back against easy answers and heavy-handed morals, which were expected in both ancient wisdom literature and Victorian children’s stories.

Proverbs in Job’s day taught that wickedness leads to punishment. Bestsellers in Carroll’s day included the “Fatal Effects of Disobedience to Parents,” a story about a little girl who burned herself to the ground after her parents told her not to play with fire.

The characters who debate Job and Alice are desperate to find these kinds of lessons in the midst of chaos.

Job’s friends claim that “upright” people never suffer and always enjoy divine protection – unaware that God has already acknowledged Job is “upright.” They look silly as they search in vain for a sin that explains Job’s suffering and scoff when he suggests there is none.

Job’s friends torment him about what he could have done to deserve such ruin. William Blake/Lithoderm/Wikimedia Commons

Alice, meanwhile, squares up against characters such as the Duchess, who offers ridiculous suggestions about the moral of Alice’s story. The Duchess scoffs when Alice suggests that there is none.

Wordplay, not swordplay

Job and Alice, on the other hand, make fun of society’s rules – as when they sing parodies of religious songs.

Psalm 8, a hymn of praise in the Bible, waxes eloquent about how beautiful it is that the almighty God spends time caring about insignificant humans. Job recites his own version, which complains that it is petty for an infinite creator to spend so much time testing humans.

Carroll grew up singing songs like “Against Idleness and Mischief,” composed by minister Isaac Watts to teach children that they should work hard like an innocent, busy bee. When Alice tries to remember this song, it comes out in Wonderland logic, where a sinister crocodile eats little fish.

Both parodies sarcastically question the underlying assumptions of the original poem. Is it always good to have God’s attention? Is hard work always good?

This shows how both books play with style, including intentional misspellings, rare and even made-up words, and elements borrowed from other languages. They coined enduring phrases such as Job’s “by the skin of my teeth” and “the root of the matter,” or Wonderland’s “down the rabbit hole.”

The King and Queen of Hearts preside over an absurd trial in Wonderland. John Tenniel/The British Library via Wikimedia Commons

These techniques add an otherworldly texture to the language of Uz and Wonderland, far from the books’ original readership in Israel and England. The diction opens countless possibilities for puns and wordplay and forces readers to question basic assumptions about language.

Order in the court

Ultimately, these stories make readers consider a fundamental desire: justice. The adventures of Alice and Job both culminate in epic trials, dominated by stormy authority figures. But if the protagonists can’t even rely on words’ meanings, how can they rely on the law?

When Alice meets Wonderland’s ruler, the Queen of Hearts, she is “frowning like a thunderstorm,” and Alice is “too much frightened to say a word.”

But she is displeased with the queen’s arbitrary distribution of justice and summons the courage to challenge her during a trial for the Knave of Hearts, who stands accused of stealing the sovereign’s tarts.

Throughout the trial, Alice becomes more and more bold. While everyone else cowers in fear, she is willing to question court conventions when they are manipulated by those in power.

Voicing her protest seems to awaken her from Wonderland and back to the “real” world. The book ends with a note about how she will never lose “the simple and loving heart of her childhood” – that is, she won’t forget that kids can have fun for fun’s sake.

God storms into the conversation. William Blake/The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons

Back in the land of Uz, Job wishes that a court judge would compel God to explain why he is being punished. Certain he did nothing wrong, he says he would wear the accusations like a crown and refute every charge.

God, aware of Job’s innocence the entire time, was never trying to punish him. The deity finally appears in the middle of a whirlwind, and Job puts his hand over his own mouth. It is difficult to argue with the Almighty.

Job had accused his friends of merely flattering God when they insisted his “punishment” was the result of divine wisdom. In the end, God blesses Job for speaking honestly – using a Hebrew word, “nekhonah,” that appears only one other time in the Bible, where it stands in contrast to flattery.

It turns out that God is pleased by those who are honest when a moral agenda doesn’t fit reality – people who, like Job and Alice, speak truth to power.

Ryan M. Armstrong, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.