But what drives us to behave this way?
That’s the question Kellogg’s has Mariam Kouhakitogether with Rajen A. Anderson of the University of Leeds and Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent, sought to investigate. Because punishment plays a large role in many major religious traditions, the researchers focused specifically on why, in some cases, religious people tend to be more punitive from the non-religious.
In a series of studies spanning three countries and major world religions—the US (Christianity), India (Hinduism), and Turkey (Islam)—researchers found that religious people are indeed more willing to punish minor offenses.
One of the main reasons for this, the researchers found, is that religious people are more likely to engage in slippery slope thinking, which is the belief that even small and relatively benign decisions will trigger a cascade of increasingly negative errors and, ultimately, a bad outcome.
“[Religious people] You expect these smaller offenses to escalate and therefore believe there should be a stronger punishment early on,” says Kouhaki.
Linking religion to slippery thinking
Koutsaki and her colleagues began by teasing out potential links between religiosity and slipshod thinking in a pilot study of nearly 400 people on the Internet.
The researchers assessed religiosity based on how each participant rated their belief in four supernatural agents — God, the devil, angels, and spirits or souls — and how important religion was to them, on a scale of one to seven. They also determined the participants’ level of slippery thinking based on how they rated the correctness of several different arguments, such as, “If you let students retake this test, they’ll want to do every assignment again for the rest of the year.”
The results confirmed that people who were more religious were more likely to engage in delusional thinking.
Then, in a separate study of 381 people in the US, the team assessed six psychological factors that might link religiosity to slipshod thinking, such as trust in others and political ideology. The two factors that best explained this association were belief in karma and moralizing self-control. Many modern religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism incorporate the concept of supernatural karma – where good behavior is rewarded while bad behavior leads to negative consequences. And slippery thinking follows a comparable line of reasoning to karma, though not exactly the same.
“Karma predicts harm to the offender in the form of cosmic justice, while slipshod thinking often predicts harm to self and others or to society at large because of these larger offenses,” the researchers write.
In a similar way, religions usually make self-control a moral issue, heightening their concern that making one small “bad” decision will lead to many even worse decisions. For example, this mindset would say that, for someone trying to lose weight, taking even one bite of 25-calorie ice cream is immoral, believing that one bite will lead to many more bites.
“When people moralize self-control, they are judging this original [instance] when someone doesn’t use it as more harmful,” Kouhaki says.
In additional studies, researchers found that people who were more religious—and more engaged in slipshod thinking—were more likely to say they would try to stop a friend from making an initial “bad” decision, like stealing $10 from the cash register at work. They were also more likely to punish minor infractions—even when they didn’t view those minor infractions as more serious than people who weren’t religious or slippery thinkers.
“It’s the idea that in order to keep a potential ethical issue from escalating, you really have to get over it in the first place,” Kouhaki says. “We all have this tendency to some degree, but here, we can see that people who are more religious are more likely to think this way.”
A cross-cultural link
To confirm that the association between religiosity and delusional thinking was not just an American Christian phenomenon, the researchers replicated their studies in India and Turkey. While the same relationship was seen in predominantly Hindu India, the finding was weaker in Islamic Turkey, which the researchers say highlights potential variability across cultures and religious traditions.
Major religions contain many different subgroups and traditions, so the strength of the link between religiosity and punishment will likely depend on how specific teachings depend on the moralization of self-control, says Koutsaki.
The findings pave the way for future research to explore the cultural factors and specific religious beliefs—such as the nature of God—that influence slippery thinking and its relationship to religiosity and punishment.
There is a growing interest in how slippery thinking might work outside of the context of religiosity and punishment. For example, it can lead some people to feel that certain aspects of the world are out of their control.
“If people feel that change is coming faster and more dramatically than they prefer, it can motivate efforts to resist and prevent these perceived changes,” says Koutsaki.
