Americans from diverse religious backgrounds view curiosity about religion as morally virtuous – a trend which was consistent across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and other Christian participants, according to a new Canadian study. Atheists were also found to regard this curiosity as moral, although less moral than a lack of religious curiosity.
Participants viewed curious characters as exerting more effort and consequently rated them as more moral. To test causality, the team manipulated perceptions of effort and showed that participants viewed curious characters who exerted effort as particularly moral.
This was discovered at Toronto’s York University in research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science under the title “Adults show positive moral evaluations of curiosity about religion.”
What information does the research provide?
Previous research examined what makes people curious and how curiosity helps people learn new information, but psychologists know less about how displaying curiosity is viewed by other people. The current research finds that people look favorably on those who show curiosity about religion and science.
“People who show curiosity about religion or science are viewed as possessing other moral character traits,” said lead author psychology Prof. Cindel White. “We found that observers perceive curious people as willing to put in effort to succeed in life, and observers perceive putting in effort to learn as morally virtuous.”
What makes people virtuous? While people widely regard prosociality as central to goodness, they wrote, curiosity has a mixed reputation. “Curiosity – the intrinsic motivation to fill knowledge gaps through question-asking or exploration – can be a valuable pathway to learning that fosters knowledge-seeking and the retention of knowledge.
White and her team asked 1,891 participants to make moral judgments about people who exhibited curiosity, possessed relevant knowledge, or lacked both curiosity and knowledge about religion and science.
Negative views of curiosity
They suggested that “negative views of religious curiosity may be especially strong among Protestants, who typically emphasize beliefs and other mental states, compared with Jewish traditions that often prioritize behaviors over faith and value questioning of accepted teachings.
Jewish participants may hold more positive views of targets who are currently ignorant of and asking questions about religious teachings. Alternatively, both Protestant and non-Protestant religious participants may perceive virtue in religious curiosity because it’s directed toward learning socially valued information and signals positive traits like willingness to put in the effort to succeed.
Religious Americans “can be perceived as or associated with movements that are, anti-science and dogmatically unquestioning of religious doctrines,” White stated, but religious participants whom we surveyed typically approved of asking question about science, one’s own religious, and other people’s religions, indicating general approval of people who desire to learn more about religious and scientific questions,” they wrote.
White noted that they measured observers’ perceptions of people who are curious – not what predicted curiosity or how people’s levels of curiosity were associated with their actual levels of effort or moral character. The current research also focuses on American participants; White would like to see future studies involve people in a wider array of countries.
In other studies, White and her colleagues are testing how children between five and eight years old evaluate curiosity about religion and science. So far, they have found that young children also positively evaluate and reward curiosity, but more research in this area is needed in order to understand the factors at play in this phenomenon.
“There are likely to be certain questions of inquiry, cultural contexts, or settings of intergroup conflict where curiosity signals negative traits, such as disloyalty to one’s in-group,” White concluded.