If You're Reading This, Then Chances Are You Trust Rapists More Than Atheists

Would You Trust This Guy More Than An Atheist?

No, you don't really trust rapists more, but some people think you do.  This article actually isn't really about atheists or rapists, it's about how the media is stupid.  It's also about how people can use scientific data to believe and say stupid things.

 Stupidity

Here's an article by the Washington Post.  The headline reads "Study: Atheists distrusted as much as rapists".  The actual article tells you something different.

The article in that link is an example of what the media does best.  It's not so much that the media misinforms you, but rather the media also shapes the way you view an issue by strategically framing the issue for you, and bypasses your own rational thought processes.  This is what Americans are used to:  Allowing others to do the thinking for them.

Here's what the article says about the study: 

The study, conducted among 350 Americans[sic] adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?

The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.

Okay, so we see that in one specific circumstance, people tend to view atheists as more likely to make the immoral choice based on this study.  Scratch that, we see that people think atheist teachers are less trustworthy.  It seems a bit strange that they felt the need to add that on the end.

Unfortunately, some searching hasn't revealed the original study, so I can't see the unfiltered version, but that's no matter because there's plenty of stupidity to write about in this post anyway.

The article quotes one of the study's coauthors as saying:

“People find atheists very suspect,” Shariff said. “They don’t fear God so we should distrust them; they do not have the same moral obligations of others. This is a common refrain against atheists. People fear them as a group.”

Shariff, who studies atheism and religion, said the findings provide a clue to combating anti-atheism prejudice.

“If you manage to offer credible counteroffers of these stereotypes, this can do a lot to undermine people’s existing prejudice,” he said. “If you realize there are all these atheists you’ve been interacting with all your life and they haven’t raped your children that is going to do a lot do dispel these stereotypes.”

So, from this limited set of data, it becomes clear that the author of the study thinks that it is very likely that you think that atheists are going to rape your children.  After all, if someone can steal a wallet, they can rape children....right?

Don't answer that, because there is no sane answer to that question.  It's just stupid.  Put several people into a room where only one of them is an atheist, and one is a rapist, and I promise you the group will prefer the atheist.  They will trust atheists more, in general, because people (however stupid they may be) are not that stupid.  

The article prefaces the whole discussion with this:

A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances.

In certain circumstances?   That's like saying atheists and rapists are comparable because they both have body hair.  Yes, if you stretch the bounds of reasoning far enough you can find some commonalities between the two groups.  However, consider whether or not people are more likely to allow an atheist or a rapist to babysit their children.  Where's that study?

The Problem with Studies

Let's do some subtle rewording of the study to see if their reasoning holds up.  Imagine if this was how the article summarized the study:

The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional person was at a party and walked into a room where a woman was passed out drunk alone and raped the woman, was the fictional person more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?

The study participants are going to inevitably choose the rapist as the most likely candidate for rape.  Obviously.  So would such a study prove that rapists are less trusted than atheists?  Well, by the logic of the Washington Post or the original study's authors it would, right?  Unless there's something special about damaging cars and stealing wallets that makes you less trustworthy than predatory and felonious criminals?  Obviously the circumstances matter, and you can change the circumstances of the study on a whim to come to any conclusion you prefer. 

With that in mind, what I'd be curious to know is how many different ways the authors had to frame the study's question before they finally got results that "proved" that atheists are mistrusted more than some other criminal element.  Perhaps that's why they added the word "teacher" into the study. Would we be so quick to say an atheist cop would steal the wallet?

Yes, I am accusing the authors of creating this study with a bias.  My only proof is that the author extrapolates from this study that people fear atheists will rape their children.  But isn't that proof enough?  The guy basically said that he thinks that you probably think that atheists are going to rape your children, based on this study, even though such an idea is obviously extremely absurd.  I don't think that bias is out of the question here.

The Washington Post article goes on to say:

Shariff [a study co-author], who studies atheism and religion, said the findings provide a clue to combating anti-atheism prejudice.

No.  The study does no such thing.  What the Washington Post article and the study are actually doing is telling you that there is a prejudice against atheism - even though they haven't proved it.  How is this honestly going to help atheists combat prejudice?  Is an atheist supposed to return someone's wallet to them and say, "Well, sir, I found your wallet on the street and returned it to you, so obviously I'm not going to rape your children.  Nor will any other atheist."  Ah, prejudice solved...

What the study authors and the Washington Post are actually doing is framing the way you think about atheists, by telling you what to think.  They aren't informing you or providing clues.  They're creating a new lie that you're supposed to forever associate with atheists:  "Atheists are those people whom everyone mistrusts more than rapists or whatever."  This is worse than misinformation, this is a pathetic form of attempted mental manipulation.

Chances are you're going to forget what the actual article said by tomorrow, but if the media does their job right then the only thing you need to remember is, "Atheists distrusted as much as rapists."  And now your thinking will always be framed by that lie. 

It's really irrelevant that this article is about atheists, by the way.  This was just a good example of the sort of cognitive shaping the media does, and it just so happened to be about atheists. 

"But, IrishFamer, I'm smarter than that.  I trust atheists, and I know that the media is full of crap."  Sure, maybe you are too smart to be fooled, because you only believe things you read from bloggers or talk radio or whatever else (sigh).  However, the fact remains that there are a lot of people who take this issue seriously, and really believe that atheists are being persecuted, and oftentimes it's a result of being told that atheists are persecuted by the media.  I mean, how can you doubt a "scientific" study?  It has the word "science" right in it! 

This brings me to the problem with studies.  Studies are fine on their own, as data.  However, the way we interpret that data is often not scientific, and subject to personal biases.  All this study tells you is that people might think that atheist (teachers) are more likely than rapists to damage a parked car without telling anyone, or steal a wallet they find.  But that does nothing to tell you whether or not atheists are mistrusted, more than any other group, by society.  The study is too limited in scope to tell you such a thing.  It's all up to interpretation, and let's face it, you're not going to actually read the study and understand it yourself, you're going to have someone interpret it for you - the media.  That's where the problem with studies comes in. 

But word is already getting around.  There's articles like this, which conclude that atheists are the most hated group in the world, or this article ("Why do believers hate atheists?") and this.  This is anecdotal, but I usually find that many of the atheists I talk to also believe that they are persecuted by society.  Where is this idea coming from?  It's coming from a plethora of studies and news articles telling everyone that it's true.