Atheists Make People Think of Rotting Corpses

Or something like that. According to these journals on social psychology (so you know it’s real science and not the fake stuff), most Americans do not get the warm and fuzzies when they think of atheists.

[I]n a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology even found that people viewed atheists as equally untrustworthy as rapists.

This … work found that atheists are perceived as without morals and values. …

It gets worse.

[R]esearchers joined with Florette Cohen at the College of Staten Island CUNY to survey a diverse group of students at that school in order to test the idea. First, 236 students were asked to sit down and write about either thoughts of their own deaths or thoughts of being in extreme pain. After a few distraction tasks, the students next answered questions about their feelings toward either atheists or Quakers (a Christian religion). About 65 percent of the participants were Christian, while the rest were Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish or another faith.

Overall, people viewed atheists much more negatively than Quakers, Cook said. But when prompted to think of death, people became even more negative toward atheists, while their attitudes toward Quakers didn’t budge. They trusted atheists less, reported fewer warm feelings toward them, and felt more prejudice, the researchers reported in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

So Quakers aren’t people? (Sorry, copyediting joke.)

I do wonder whether the “atheists” most people conjure up are Stalin, Mao, and a lot of angry Frenchmen in the guillotine-supply business. Which is why, you know, death.

But here’s the kicker:

“We found that thinking about atheism actually increased thoughts of death to the same extent as thinking about death itself,” said [Corey Cook, a social psychologist at the University of Washington, Tacoma], who described the result as “surprising.”

Atheists may cue thoughts of death because they threaten people’s vision of the afterlife, the researchers wrote. When these central values about life after death are threatened, people cling to them more tightly and reject those who don’t share them.

Or they’re afraid the atheists are going to kill them. Hence the rejection.

It may also be that hanging around atheists makes you want to kill yourself. Imagine being caught in an elevator with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, PZ Myers, and Bill Maher. Who wouldn’t beg for a quick end to it all?

Although, to be fair, I can easily imagine that the company of the late Christopher Hitchens, Kurt Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams (not to mention the very late Mark Twain) would be a blast, and filled with magical tales and a helluva lotta laughs. Whereas, being caught in an elevator with any number of fundamentalist Christians I can think of would make me begin an escape mission akin to Andy’s in The Shawshank Redemption.

So the real takeaway from this story is: enter elevators at your own risk. And watch your grammar: “Overall, people viewed atheists much more negatively than (they viewed) Quakers”— otherwise it could be read as “Overall, people viewed atheists much more negatively than Quakers (did).”

Oh, same to you…