Tomas Ståhl of the University of Illinois suggests that the biggest difference between theists and atheists is that the latter are less likely to support group cohesion and more likely to judge everything right and wrong in terms of immediately visible consequences.
In many countries, there is a cultural Perception that atheists have a lesser sense of morality. However, this is a vague claim and has not been systematically studied by scholars to find out where the moral sense of theists and atheists actually differ.
Stoll has recently completed the first formal study on this topic. He conducted two surveys of 429 Americans on Amazon’s crowdfunding contractor platform Mechanical Turk, and two more surveys of 4,193 Americans and Swedes. These people included a variety of religious beliefs, races, and atheists.
The United States is perceived to be a country where most people are religious; Sweden is a country where most people are not religious.
Stoll’s analysis suggests that theists and atheists appear to have something in common on the surface when it comes to the values of protecting the weak, supporting freedom, not oppressing, and supporting rational thought.
However, theists are more likely to support various values derived from the guiding framework of promoting group cohesion, while atheists are more likely to use the immediate consequences of each action as a criterion for moral judgment.
The study was published Feb. 24 in the journal Public Library of Science Omnibus (PLOS ONE).
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