Asking what God would want really does seem to curb prejudice

A GOOD way to start an argument at a dinner party is to assert that religion divides people and inspires them to evil. There is plenty to support this contention: anti-Muslim pogroms by Hindus in India; the bombings and murders carried out by anti-abortion Christians in America; the long list of crimes committed against Christians (and Zoroastrians, Yazidis, non-Sunni Muslims and anyone else who disagrees with them) by Islamic State. But there is a good case for the defence, too. Around the world the religious shelter the homeless, feed the hungry and perform all sorts of charitable works.

Trading anecdotes, though, is unlikely to convince anyone. Much better to do an experiment. And that, in a small way, is exactly what a team led by Jeremy Ginges, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research in New York, has just done.

As part of some broader public-opinion polling, Dr Ginges and his colleagues presented 555 Palestinian youngsters, between the ages of 11 and 18, with a classic ethical dilemma known as the trolley problem. Participants were invited to imagine a runaway lorry (railways and their attendant trolleys being rare in Gaza and the West Bank) careering down a street. If no action is taken, the lorry will plough into a group of five children, killing them. But if an innocent bystander is pushed in front of the lorry its progress will be halted and the children saved—at the expense of the bystander’s life.

So far, so standard. But Dr Ginges gave the question—to push or not to push—a religious twist. His participants were Muslim, and most were personally religious (more than 80% reported praying regularly). He presented them with two versions of the thought experiment. In one, the endangered children were fellow Muslims. In the other, they were Jews. In both, the sacrificial victim was a Palestinian of unspecified religion. He then asked his young volunteers to consider, in each case, how one ought to act—and then how they thought God would want people to act.

Dr Ginges’s idea was to test a common theory, that one reason religion promotes violence is because it leads its adherents to view those of different faiths, or none, as inferior. If such an effect were real, he reasoned, the Palestinian territories ought to be good places to find it.

His results, which have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will bring some cheer to fans of religion. When asked to consider just their own opinions, 55% of respondents indicated that the religion of the threatened children would make no difference to their behaviour; 42% said they would be more likely to act to save their co-religionists than to save the Jewish children; and 3% swung the other way, saying they were more willing to save Jewish children than Muslim ones. When asked to consider how their God would prefer them to act, this pattern became even more pronounced. Then, 66% said religious affiliation would have no impact on their actions. Only 30% of respondents favoured the Muslim children.

Dr Ginges and his colleagues therefore raise the possibility that beliefs about God can indeed moderate the distinctions people make about the value of “them” and “us”, albeit that in this case those distinctions stem in the first place from different beliefs about God. This is certainly not always the case. Other studies involving Palestinians and Jews have shown that levels of attendance at collective worship are related to support for violent self-sacrifice in favour of one’s co-religionists (up to and including suicide bombing). But, for men and women of goodwill, it is a hopeful sign.