Atheist primes reduce religiosity and subjective wellbeing

ABSTRACT

In recent years, atheism has grown in popularity, partly inspired by the rise to prominence of a group of public intellectuals called the “New Atheists” who argue against religion in public fora. What are the social consequences of this development? We test in a laboratory study in Kenya whether exposure to atheist arguments affects self-reported and implicit religiosity, subjective wellbeing, and self-reported tolerance of different social groups. We find a significant negative effect of emotional arguments against religion on both self-reported and implicit measures of religiosity, especially among men, but no effect of scientific appeals. Subjective wellbeing is strongly reduced after emotional atheist messages, again especially among men, suggesting that emotional atheist arguments may have a wellbeing cost. We find no effects of atheism messages on self-reported tolerance. Together, these results suggest that emotional atheist arguments reduce religiosity and subjective wellbeing, especially among men.

KEYWORDS:

• Atheism
• wellbeing
• laboratory experiment
• priming

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the study participants for generously giving their time, and to Ara Norenzayan, Azim Shariff, and conference participants at The Symposium on Economic Experiments in Developing Countries for comments and discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Johannes Haushofer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9984-9113

Notes

1 USD values are calculated at purchasing power parity, using the 2014 World Bank PPP estimate for private consumption in Kenya: 0.024.

2 Restricting participation to university students ensured English comprehension. Although Kenyan universities do not typically require an official test of English proficiency, matriculating students are expected to be proficient in written and spoken English, and much of the instruction is in English. Additionally, Busara has confirmed through previous studies that the vast majority of Kenyan university students are highly proficient in English.