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from the I'm-morally-opposed-to-statements-about-morality dept.
Simply telling people that their opinions are based on morality will make them stronger and more resistant to counterarguments, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that people were more likely to act on an opinion - what psychologists call an attitude - if it was labeled as moral and were more resistant to attempts to change their mind on that subject.
The results show why appeals to morality by politicians and advocacy groups can be so effective, said Andrew Luttrell, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at The Ohio State University.
"The perception that an attitude we hold is based on morality is enough to strengthen it," Luttrell said.
"For many people, morality implies a universality, an ultimate truth. It is a conviction that is not easily changed."
The key finding was how easy it was to strengthen people's beliefs by using the 'moral' label, said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State.
"Morality can act as a trigger - you can attach the label to nearly any belief and instantly make that belief stronger," Petty said.
Always preface your comments with, "The Lord sayeth..."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jdavidb on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:10PM
Always preface your comments with, "The Lord sayeth..."
Morality doesn't have to come from religion. Most people agree on certain basic moral principles: not killing people would be an example. Most atheists have a code of morality and are frequently very moral people by standards most people agree to.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:20PM
Yes, a moral system is a set of rules defining what YOU consider good or evil. Good atheists build their moral system, bad atheists follow the herd. Bad believers follow the herd, good believers question every moral precept coming from their religious leaders to see if it is actually consistent with the religious message. (or at least these are my moral rules to determine good/bad un/believers).
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:40PM
Of course, in some religions those you classify as "good believers" end up getting killed for it.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:47PM
Yeah but one of those says that all earthly domains are Satans' (Mt. 4:8) so it's not much surprising.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:52PM
which is kind of funny; since god is on record for doing far more damage to the world and to humanity than 'satan' ever did.
god is angry, untrustworthy and does not seem to really care about us (by all indications of the xtian bible). satan, otoh, has never tried to destroy the world, sent floods, turned people into salt towers, etc.
but of course, neither is real. both are childhood fear-factors to get you to do what some authority thinks you should do.
we don't believe in roman/greek gods anymore. we don't believe in egyptian gods anymore. it boggles my mind that people can be so selective and say 'well, those WERE fake; ours is real' and not even be aware that across the globe, someone equally valid is saying the same thing about YOU and YOUR chosen set of gods and saints.
its a mystery to me that people who are so sure of their own religion are not able to put themselves in someone else's shoes, look at things from their POV and realize that its ALL arbitrary. your ideas are no better than theirs. they were told by their people that they are right; same as you and your people. why, then, can you be SO SURE that yours is the right one?
water freezes at the same temperature everywhere. its a constant and no sane person argues this. you don't 'believe' that water freezes at 0, it DOES freeze at zero (C). but we give up on this idea of universal truth when it comes to magic sky wizards. for those, we don't require any rational thought or logic. and the reason is (as I said in my previous post) its because they get you when you are young and fill your head with crap that is embedded so deeply and intertwined with 'happy warm emotions' that its nearly impossible to detangle and separate later.
we never program kids to think that 'our' freezing point is not the same as 'theirs'. but we surely do when it comes to religion.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:05PM
You can lambaste me all you like but I will still choose to believe that "love your neighbour as yourself" is far better than anything Daesh has to offer the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:49PM
far better than anything Daesh has to offer the world
I think I know who you are, AC.... There's only one moron who religiously tries to get people to use that term.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:04PM
While I take exception to your calling me a moron, I want to point out that there legions of us who refer to them as Daesh. In fact, quite a few are Arab Muslims, who refuse to bless the group with any hint of legitimacy by implying that they are a legitimate Islamic State. Me? I just like calling them Daesh because they are threatening to cut out the tongue of anyone they catch doing it. If it pisses them off that much then I know I'm getting inside their head and rattling them.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:55PM
Oh come off it, even Islam says "he is not a believer who wants not for his neighbor what he wants for himself."
ALL religions figure out the Golden Rule at some point. It's a logical local maximum, even if it's not the absolute maximum, for human behavior. And before you say "But Jesus said the POSITIVE Golden Rule first," no, he didn't; Confucius beat him to it almost by 500 years, using characters which more or less sum up to "as [one's own] heart."
The problem, of course, is in defining who is one's neighbor. And any feeb who says "everyone" in one breath and "but people who don't believe like me get thrown into eternal torture" in the next doesn't know what words mean.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:53PM
And you might want to read your Bible a bit more carefully. Moses said it around a thousand years before Confucius. Indeed, if you read the Gospels carefully you will note that Moses is being referenced explicitly (Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34). Another recounting of the story has the Greatest Commandments being recited by "an expert in the Law" when Jesus turns the question back around on him ("How do you read it?") (Luke 10:25-28). Before you deign to educate "feebs" it would be good for you to get an adequate grasp of the material yourself.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 03 2016, @12:35AM
Moses said it around a thousand years before Confucius.
Unless, of course, he didn't. There is a certain problem with relying on the Bible as a historical reference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @02:58AM
Question: why are you willing to accept accounts of Confucius as "historical" but not Moses? What is your basis for accepting one but not the other? I am genuinely curious!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday June 03 2016, @05:04AM
Question: why are you willing to accept accounts of Confucius as "historical" but not Moses? What is your basis for accepting one but not the other? I am genuinely curious!
Confucius was better documented and emulated by a lot more people in his time. The story of Moses has evolved over many more centuries than the tales of Confucius. I doubt it has much resemblance to the original events. For example, most of the Old Testament, including the Book of Leviticus, is heavily tainted by propaganda during the Babylon exile period (which let us note, is at or before the birth of Confucius, so the golden rule as expressed in the Bible probably would still predate Confucius) and after.
Now, maybe Moses did state the golden rule, but it's hard to square that with the stories of merciless Hebrew invaders in the decades after his death.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 03 2016, @03:18AM
Nice try, but if this is actually the case, Christians look WORSE that I portrayed them, as this is one of their usual arguments for Jesus being different from all those other religions' founders. That sound is the sound of 2.2 billion own goals at once. Nice job!
Besides which, Moses...is not the example you want to use. Nor is his demonic God, Yahweh. If YOU would read YOUR Bible a bit more, you'd notice Yahweh has much to say about not eating shellfish or mixing fabric, but has no problem with slavery. You are really, REALLY not in a position to be trying this argument.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:29PM
> does not seem to really care about us
getting crucified, a clever way to not really care.
The problem with modern atheists is that, even starting from the hypothesis that there is no god, your arguments are still baseless. Any idiot can disprove an incomplete version of a theorem like you attack a specially crafted "god does not care" religion, and a specially crafted reality where acts against religion have not caused many, many more deaths than the old testament God. Oh but maybe you were talking about satan the character, the one who is behind every death of any descendant of mr. Adam the First having given him the possibility of committing sin? You are a funny guy.
(As an aside, believers say, like, "knowing good and evil means being responsible, able to sin, and ultimately, able to be judged and condemned from that sin. Animals driven by instinct are not responsible. The Genesis story is symbolism about this simple fact" and all you atheists can say about it is "OH BUT THEY ONLY ATE AN APPLE HOW VENGEFUL IS THAT GOD FOR DISOBEYING A PETTY ORDER". Which is pathetic?).
As for the objection I try to infer from your post, starting from the opposite 'there is a god' POV:
1. a god can do whatever, you are not able to judge it because you do not know the ultimate effect of his actions.
Try and disprove "any interaction which we interpret as casual is directly operated by GOD ALMIGHTY with the objective of obtaining the ultimately best possible outcome for the Creation". If you can't disprove the preposterous proposition above, how can you judge any single act? But this is a logic trick, let's see the bigger picture.
2. the previous applies to satan, except that by not being a dual entity but a creature, so his authority is limited to what he can get away with, just like us. It is a fundamental distinction. God is like a programmer who writes code and executes it in his head. Your objection is like saying the programmer cannot remove a piece of code from his "act".
3. acts of men proclaiming to do god's will are obviously not justified by 1. and 2., plus, being less able to talk to God as Satan is able to, you can prove what god's will is, in fact asserting that a god *needs* man to do things should get people struck by lightning with nobody being surprised about it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday June 04 2016, @05:10AM
lol
just 'lol
you guys beieve quite silly things with zero proof.
save me the wall of text or gish gallop, m'kay?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday June 04 2016, @10:56PM
Proof of god is the silly concept, m'lord.
Since you might be tempted of theorizing one, I suggest to start with simpler things.
For example you design an AI in a virtual world, the AI gets self aware, how do you show yourself and prove you live beyond the virtual world without AI having to BELIEVE that those pixels making up your avatar are not just part of the virtual world, a prank, or a more powerful AI?
But of course you would be content with a miracle, like all the others.
Miracles unfortunately cannot tell the hypothetical god from a sufficiently resourceful creature. High scientific knowledge, high tech, mind control, and so on. So, back to square one.
In fact when strange things happen to more than one person, the position of those who choose not to believe is "collective hallucination". Not very scientific, but still an equivalent position of a believer.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:07PM
A small quibble:
Those aren't moral rules. Those are logical rules for implementing your underlying moral system. Morality isn't a mechanism for reasoning, it's a set of principles for evaluating situations and actions.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:21PM
So always preface your comments with, "The Constitution sayeth...."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:37PM
Good thing the constitution can be amended if necessary. But really, I don't see it as unreasonable to expect that the government follow the constitution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:58PM
(1) The history of all religions is constant amending, even so called "literalists" pick and choose what parts to focus on and what contradicting parts to ignore
(2) People make all kinds of shitty arguments and use half-assed constitutional interpretations to justify them.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:36PM
Absolutely. There are in fact quite a few common moral statements that are pretty much universal in human society, and no wonder because those are useful evolutionary adaptations. Here are some of the basic rules:
- Don't kill anybody in your own society. (There's no equivalent rule for those jerks from other societies, though.)
- Take care of children, at least once you know they won't be dead within their first year of life.
- Take care of yourself if you are capable of doing so.
- Be basically honest with those in your own society. (Again, tricking those jerks from other societies may be OK.)
- Respect the elderly, even if you don't heed their advice.
- Don't bang your relatives. (Who exactly qualifies as a relative varies a bit, but immediate family is obviously out.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @03:54PM
- Don't bang your relatives.
I don't see a moral issue with incest if the relationship is consensual. Having children is not a given. Even if the couple wants to have children, the chance of genetic defects is not absolute or even that high in most cases. Even if the child would have genetic defects, they were simply born that way, and they know no other way of living. It's also not necessarily true that a resulting child will have severe enough genetic defects and taxpayers will somehow shoulder some of the burden. We don't forbid couples who would likely (even in cases where it's more likely than incest) produce children with genetic defects from breeding in other cases, yet incest is treated as an especially horrific case. It really just seems like a knee-jerk reaction to me.
This is really a case of people needing to mind their own business, even if they think it's 'icky'.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:44PM
These moral rules are ones that tend to be enforced by human societies, whether or not they're actually justified. And in the case of incest, that's a pretty universal no-no, with the only real exception being very specific royal bloodlines where the siblings were kept apart from each other growing up so as to not imprint "this person is a relative" on their psyche the way almost everyone does with their actual siblings (this effect is social, not genetic - step-siblings raised together experience the same kind of revulsion).
Also, parent-child and uncle/aunt-niece/nephew incest is never considered consensual because of the power the adult has over the child. Much of sibling incest isn't either, because of the great power differences between the partners. For example, a 17-year-old is in a very different place physically and mentally than a 13-year-old.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:32PM
Also, parent-child and uncle/aunt-niece/nephew incest is never considered consensual because of the power the adult has over the child. Much of sibling incest isn't either, because of the great power differences between the partners. For example, a 17-year-old is in a very different place physically and mentally than a 13-year-old.
That's fallacious reasoning. Just because the adult has power over the child doesn't mean they're actually using it. To say that it is never consensual is just an absurd legal fiction at best. Furthermore, why bring incestuous relationships that involve children into it? You're already starting from a very strange place, and the fact that it's incest is entirely incidental; the subject could be about gay relationships, heterosexual relationships, or anything really. It's possible for a 20 year old to get into an incestuous relationship with their parent; they don't need to do so when they are children. Incest is far more broad than relationships with children, so they can't be treated as the same thing. With that said, I'd be extremely hesitant to trust any social science studies, given the lack of scientific rigor in those fields and the extreme societal bias against incest.
I also don't like this thinking that because someone's brain isn't fully developed, they can't comprehend the consequences of their actions. While this might be true more frequently than if they were older, that doesn't mean it's impossible for them to understand the consequences of their actions, and really, adults are hardly better at this. People drink alcohol and make decisions, make decisions when they are sleepy, make spur-of-the-moment decisions, etc. Really, people in general are bad at long-term thinking. Let people make mistakes and learn from them.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday June 03 2016, @03:03AM
...unless they deserve it.
...unless they are exploitable, an economic or societal drain, inconvenient, or someone else's.
...unless someone of higher status compels you to do otherwise, or unless you can compel someone of lower status to do it for you.
...unless they are of a lower status to you; or unless it is an obligation, economically or societally advantageous, convenient or undetectable.
...unless they are exploitable, an economic or societal drain, inconvenient, or someone else's.
...unless it is an obligation; economically or societally advantageous, convenient or undetectable.
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FTFUniversality--references available upon request--or, unfortunately, unnecessary with a fair knowledge of world history and society in general :(
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:45PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday June 05 2016, @07:08AM
Thanks for having the intellectual honesty to admit that. Of course, you still think all non-Christians are going to fry, riiiiight?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...