Abstract
Recent research suggests presumptions about atheists’ uncommitted mating strategy causes atheists to seem less trustworthy, and that people who are more religious or espouse less agreeable attitudes toward uncommitted mating (i.e., more restricted sociosexual attitudes) tend to harbor greater anti-atheist attitudes. We provided additional tests of these ideas and addressed whether they could extend to discrimination against atheists in a “high-trust domain:” likelihood of granting approval to marry one’s adult child. An MTurk sample of U.S. parents (N = 301) self-reported their religiosity and sociosexual attitudes, then were randomly assigned to a condition wherein they read about their adult child’s fiancé who was either depicted as an atheist or devoted Christian. Participants reported their likelihood of approving of their child marrying the fiancé and estimated the fiancé’s committed mating strategy, trustworthiness, and dark personality characteristics. Participants with high religiosity presumed an atheist (vs. devoted Christian) fiancé endorsed a less committed mating strategy, which, apart from presumptions about the fiancé’s standing on dark personality characteristics, was associated with (a) perceiving the atheist as less trustworthy and (b) indicating less approval for their child marrying an atheist. Broadly, the research extends theorizing on how atheism relates to perceived threats to moral values and discrimination.
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Data Availability
All data and materials generated and analyzed during the current study are available at OSF: https://osf.io/9fwcj/?view_only=61f38a2f30ea43f7a3b1496abb0290b5. Note that “MTurk” variable (described in syntax) is not included to protect survey respondents’ privacy because some respondents entered their unique worker IDs.
Notes
Given that the work was theoretically motivated, the sampling was not designed to obtain a representative sampling of U.S. adults; however, the number of exclusions could raise additional concerns about the non-representative nature of the sample. Because only five excluded participants reported demographic data, we were unable to perform meaningful comparisons between the excluded and included sample on demographics to assess the extent of the issue. That said, theoretical testing of relationships can occur with samples that are non-representative (e.g., college students) even though descriptive statistics that arise from these samples may not be of much value for estimating actual population values (Leary, 2004).
It could be possible to insert the outcomes together in modeling and run the analysis as one model (with path modeling software). This approach would not influence the results, but it would greatly enhance the complexity of the figure (i.e., making them harder to read). Hence, our choice was to simplify the figures and description of the results by modeling the outcomes separately.
See Online Resource 1 for additional models that separately investigated religiosity and sociosexual attitudes as moderators for each path in different models. Effect sizes in these models were highly similar to what are reported here in Model 1 and Model 2.
For analyses involving two moderators, all variables except the other moderator are held constant at their means; by default, PROCESS holds the other moderator constant at its median, as recommended by Hayes (2017).
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Joshua T. Lambert and William Hart contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Joshua T. Lambert, William Hart, and Charlotte Kinrade. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Joshua T. Lambert, William Hart, and Charlotte Kinrade, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Lambert, J.T., Hart, W. & Kinrade, C. Testing a perceived uncommitted mating strategy account for atheist distrust and marriage disapproval. Curr Psychol 42, 20916–20930 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03151-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03151-6