Anti-atheist discrimination emerges only where trust in strangers matters

Evidence

Finally, the logic of supernatural monitoring in prosocial religions predicts that anti-atheist prejudice should be exaggerated when trust is especially important, and minimized when trust in not a factor. We investigated this possibility using a job selection survey in which participants varying on religious involvement chose candidates for two jobs varying in the degree to which they require trustworthy candidates using only limited demographic information, which included whether the candidate was religious or was an atheist. We compared simulated hiring decisions for two jobs that were similar in terms of required pleasant or friendly personality, but differed on required trustworthiness (for example, day-care worker versus waitress). This way, we could assess the impact of trust, holding constant pleasantness. As expected, participants significantly excluded the atheist when hiring a day-care worker, and once again believers showed this tendency to a greater extent than nonbelievers. However, participants showed no such preference when hiring someone for a job for which trust is less essential, and belief in God was unrelated to the hiring decision in this low-trust context. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 283

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s partner-choice (Baumard) integration: trust-sensitive settings are where religious exclusion and the fumi-e trampling bite hardest.
• QUESTION: The study compares day-care worker vs waitress; would similar effects hold for positions of comparable trust but great social distance from children?