Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Exploring the Atheist Personality


" I love the idea of debunking or analyzing the veracity of the common stereotype of atheists. I think this is an excellent direction for scholarship. Furthermore, your results do provide some interesting preliminary evidence."

So wrote Laura King, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Research in Personality.

"Given the vast increase in public discourse about religion and atheism, and books like those of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, this is indeed a good time to be doing scientific work on the types of questions raised in this manuscript. There are interesting questions about whether the stereotypes about atheists are true. Are they indeed immoral, immune to awe experiences, unhappy people? This manuscript therefore opens up interesting questions."

This was the opening paragraph of the review Dr. King obtained from an expert reviewer.

But alas.... research is hard. I think I'm gonna hafta file drawer this paper because I don't have the resources to collect more participants as both King and the reviewer felt was necessary (and I do see their point).

But if the topic interests you, check out the complete paper here, because "preliminary evidence" can still be worth a look.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But I want to know about your results on the prosopagnosia test!

HumanProject said...

I am now developing a new study that i'll put up on survey monkey in a few weeks, stay tuned...