The Very Interesting Place

Being Virtuous May Not Mean Being Correct

Even though religion may be declining throughout the Western world, the return of abortion restrictions across the United States has resulted in no small amount of indignation. For example, at The Website Formerly Known as Twitter, David Leavitt recently tweeted:

It sickens me how many sexist assholes there are. People swearing at me for believing women should have control over their own body. People replying that they're happy women's rights are being taken away. People replying who think it's the women's fault for getting pregnant.

In case this is too subtle, the Daily Kos is more direct:

'Pro-life' psychopaths promote empathy-free policies that kill people.

Now I’m not interested in defending pro-life policies. I count myself lucky that Mrs. Apple Pie and myself are nearing the end of our reproductive years, and don’t have to worry quite so much about the current political turmoil.

What I am going to do is ask whether you really think pro-lifers are the bad guys.

The Portrait of the Pro-Life

Demographically speaking, pro-Life Americans are generally older, poorer, and overwhelmingly religious.¹ We don’t have to wonder what the personality of the typical religious person is. Studies return the same results again and again:

As expected, Honesty–Humility was one of the strongest personality correlate of religiosity. Higher scores on religiousness were also associated with Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and to some extent, Extraversion showing that the main personality characteristics of religiosity are consistent across religious contexts and personality models.²

We review research on personality/religiousness associations, integrating earlier meta-analyses with recent large-sample online studies. We find that general religiousness shows small positive associations with broad personality factors (e.g. HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Big Five Agreeableness, Conscientiousness) and somewhat stronger positive associations with narrower personality traits involving prosocial tendencies (e.g. altruism, fairness, forgivingness).³

The findings offered strong support for the HEXACO approach: honesty–humility significantly predicted nearly all of the religion outcomes, but the effects of agreeableness were significantly smaller…⁴

Past research has shown that prosocial behavior is related to higher religiosity and Honesty–Humility and lower levels of the Dark Triad (i.e. narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism)… Results suggested that Honesty–Humility and the Dark Triad traits uniquely relate to prosociality, religious orientation and happiness with Honesty–Humility evidencing stronger relations than the Dark Triad as measured by the Dirty Dozen.⁵

The relationship of religiousness with the HEXACO (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness) model of personality was studied in Iran and the United States. Correlations of personality factors and religiousness were generally similar across the two societies. In both countries, religiousness was associated with higher scores on Honesty-Humility, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The Honesty-Humility factor was one of the strongest correlates of religiousness in both countries.⁶

Religion may be deeply uncool nowadays. (Definitely it’s not for all the cool kids.) But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, at least statistically speaking, religious people are the good guys. It isn’t just that they score high in Honesty-Humility, it’s what being honest and humble means.

Religious people are more prosocial,⁷ donating more to both religious and secular charities, in part, because they trust charity more,⁸ and their donations are largely insensitive to their economic situation.⁹ A recent study of Millennials I just read found the very religious were less likely to engage in a broad range of unethical consumer behaviors, like giving misleading price information to a clerk for an unpriced item, not saying anything if the waiter miscalculates the bill in their favour, using an expired coupon for merchandise, or using a computer software or games that they didn’t buy.¹⁰

And unsurprisingly, knowing that Honesty-Humility is essentially the reverse of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and Narcissism, it should be no surprise that the religious are less prone to grandiose Narcissism¹¹¹²¹³ and Machiavellianism.¹⁴ They are also found to have lower levels of psychopathy, and higher levels of empathy.¹⁵

The Very Interesting Place

Now if you are a religious person in the conventional sense, well, you can probably stop reading. Nothing to see here! Religious people are right and good; you already knew that.

But what if you are of a more… secular persuasion? What if you think it is, at the very best, unlikely that a conscious, loving, omnibenevolent deity created any of us to be friends with?

In that case, I’d like to welcome you to a very interesting place.

Now, I’m no atheist. Longtime readers will know I find the idea of a God or Gods reasonable, at least in theory. But if there were some kind of God out there, I strongly suspect it would look more like Uranus or Ymir than Jahweh or Allah. I mention Jahweh or Allah specifically because the research I’ve been quoting above is on people who worship them specifically. For what it’s worth, Christianity and Islam are representative; more than half of religious people today worship are either Christian or Muslim. And yet both the Bible and the Koran contain contradictions, which are the kinds of things that tend to make critically-minded skeptics think they can’t be relied upon, any more than the beliefs and testimony of innumerable people across the ages.

But if you think for just a moment, it’s very obvious that this skepticism requires cynicism: Cynicism about the meaning of life—are we created from random processes, or by a loving, moral deity? Cynicism about the intelligence, honesty, and clear-headedness of those whose testemony makes up religious works. Cynicism about the prayers of those who said they would speak with God or angels on our behalf.

And this cold, cynical way of relating to the world is not the way the good guys relate to the world: not with empathy, honesty, or a strong moral attitude, but with a perspective tinged with Machiavellianism. So if you reject classical religion—particularly if you live in a country with high rates of religiosity, and many people around you see this differently from the way you do—then you have to admit that

• having a predisposition to do the right thing

can be very different from

• having a predisposition to see reality as it is.

And once you make it to the interesting place, you stop being able to see your opponents in the same way that you once did. The crude desire to smooth over complexity and insist pro-life psychopaths have no empathy is revealed as an obvious delusion. Pro-lifers as a whole are brimming with so much empathy that they collapse the future into the present and empathize with the innocent embryonic cell clusters. Projecting emotions onto the universe, looking forward to seeing loved ones in heaven, and espousing the tenets of an absolute morality may be intellectual pitfalls, but it’s the innately virtuous people who are most likely to fall in. You’re not going to be able to pull them all out. It’s their nature to fall in.

A very interesting place, by Apple Pie and his first kid, who’s figured out how to make stuff on Playground AI

Now some people get to the very interesting place and get seriously confused looking at the Escherean topography, or the weird way the water doesn’t seem to reflect the sky. They start yelling at everyone for wasting power pumping water up into the falls, for needlessly running so many outdoor lights, and building unsafe structures in clear violation of any sensible earthquake codes. The virtuous people who live there must be bad! Good guys are bad guys! Black is white! I’m not making fun of anybody here. I’m speaking from experience—this happenned to me for a year or two, until eventually my innate desire to be virtuous for its own sake, and the pathalogical obnoxiousness of the people I’d been hanging around with, just couldn’t be ignored.

The very interesting place is like that. You have to accept that people who are against you, and oppose everything you stand for, might be absolute angels. And sometimes you might be on the other side of this—if there are people out there who really do believe things because they’re awful, reprehensible deplorables, are they really wrong because they’re bad? Or are you the deluded angel this time?

These are lessons I will not easily forget. Now I hesitate before demonizing apparently selfish anti-vaccers or woke bloodhounds looking for people to cancel. People who believe things that are wrong—totally, obviously wrong, so wrong you wish there were a law, so wrong you’d swear it has to hurt to be so wrong—sometimes they believe those things not because of their vices, or because of their failings, but rather, at least in some small part, because of their virtue.

1. 'Pro-Choice' or 'Pro-Life' Demographic Table. (n.d.). Gallup News. Retrieved September 16, 2023, from https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018-demographic-tables.aspx

2. Aghababaei, N., Błachnio, A., Arji, A., Chiniforoushan, M., Tekke, M., & Fazeli Mehrabadi, A. (2016). Honesty–humility and the HEXACO structure of religiosity and well-being. Current Psychology, 35, 421-426.

3. Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2021). A review of personality/religiousness associations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 40, 51-55.

4. Silvia, P. J., Nusbaum, E. C., & Beaty, R. E. (2014). Blessed are the meek? Honesty–humility, agreeableness, and the HEXACO structure of religious beliefs, motives, and values. Personality and Individual Differences, 66, 19-23.

5. Aghababaei, N., Mohammadtabar, S., & Saffarinia, M. (2014). Dirty Dozen vs. the H factor: Comparison of the Dark Triad and Honesty–Humility in prosociality, religiosity, and happiness. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 6-10.

6. Aghababaei, N., Wasserman, J. A., & Nannini, D. (2014). The religious person revisited: Cross-cultural evidence from the HEXACO model of personality structure. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 17(1), 24-29.

7. Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2021). A review of personality/religiousness associations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 40, 51-55.

8. Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E. (2019). Holier than thou: Investigating the relationship between religiosity and charitable giving. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 24(1), e1619.

9. Helms, S. E., & Thornton, J. P. (2012). The influence of religiosity on charitable behavior: A COPPS investigation. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 41(4), 373-383.

10. Arli, D., Tkaczynski, A., & Anandya, D. (2019). Are religious consumers more ethical and less Machiavellian? A segmentation study of Millennials. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 43(3), 263-276.

11. Hermann, A. D., & Fuller, R. C. (2018). Grandiose narcissism and religiosity. Handbook of Trait Narcissism: Key Advances, Research Methods, and Controversies, 379-387.

12. Watson, P. J., Hood, R. W., Morris, R. J., & Hall, J. R. (1987). The relationship between religiosity and narcissism. Counseling and Values.

13. Daghigh, A., DeShong, H. L., Daghigh, V., Niazi, M., & Titus, C. E. (2019). Exploring the relation between religiosity and narcissism in an Iranian sample. Personality and Individual Differences, 139, 96-101.

14. Arli, D., Tkaczynski, A., & Anandya, D. (2019). Are religious consumers more ethical and less Machiavellian? A segmentation study of Millennials. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 43(3), 263-276.

15. Łowicki, P., & Zajenkowski, M. (2017). No empathy for people nor for God: The relationship between the Dark Triad, religiosity and empathy. Personality and Individual Differences, 115, 169-173.