Religious belief widely viewed as safeguard against ‘grossly immoral conduct’, according to new research 
 
 Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study 
 
 Atheists are more easily suspected of evil deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists – even by fellow atheists, according to the authors of a new study. 
 
 The finding suggests that in an increasingly secular world, many – including some atheists – still hold the view that people will do bad things unless they fear punishment from all-seeing gods. 
 
 The results of the study “show that across the world, religious belief is intuitively viewed as a necessary safeguard against the temptations of grossly immoral conduct,” an international team wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. It revealed that “atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous”. 
 
 Atheist pastor sparks debate by 'irritating the church into the 21st century' Read more 
 
 The study measured the attitudes of more than 3,000 people in 13 countries on five continents. They ranged from “very secular” countries such as China and the Netherlands, to those with high numbers of religious believers, such as the United Arab Emirates, the US and India. 
 
 The countries had populations that were either predominantly Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim or non-religious. 
 
 Participants were given a description of a fictional evildoer who tortured animals as a child, then grows up to become a teacher who murders and mutilates five homeless people. Half of the group were asked how likely it was that the perpetrator was a religious believer, and the other half how likely he was an atheist. The team found that people were about twice as likely to assume that the serial killer was an atheist. 
 
 “It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias,” the study’s co-author, Will Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said. 
 
 “I suspect that this stems from the prevalence of deeply entrenched pro-religious norms. Even in places that are currently quite overtly secular, people still seem to intuitively hold on to the believe that religion is a moral safeguard.” 
 
 Only in Finland and New Zealand, two secular countries, did the experiment not yield conclusive evidence of anti-atheist prejudice, said the team. 
 
 Distrust of atheists was “very strong in the most highly religious states like the United States, United Arab Emirates and India”, said Gervais, and lower in more secular countries. 
 
 Such research was about more than stigma alone, he said. “In many places, atheism can be dangerous, if not fatal.” 
 
 In a comment carried by the journal, Adam Cohen and Jordan Moon of the Arizona State University’s psychology department said the study marked “an important advance in explaining the prevalence of anti-atheist attitudes”. 

 Most people around the world, whether religious or not, presume that serial killers are more likely to be atheists than believers in any god, suggests a new study, which counters the common assumption that increasingly secular societies are equally tolerant of nonbelievers. Avowed atheists exhibited the same bias in judging sadistic criminals, the study found. 
 
 The new report, appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, included more than 3,000 people in 13 countries, both secular states like the Netherlands and Finland, and deeply religious ones like the United Arab Emirates and India. The findings suggest that, despite declining attendance at churches, mosques and temples in many communities, the cultural tenet that religion is a bulwark against immorality remains intact, experts said, even in those who deny it explicitly. 
 
 Previous studies had found evidence of broad-based public suspicion of nonbelievers in smaller samples within religious countries, like the United States. The new survey suggests the findings may extend globally, and it finds that the same kinds of suspicion pervade even highly secular societies. 
 
 “What’s exciting about the paper for me is that it’s a great first step,” said Richard Sosis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. “They’ve got a method that can be used to see how this bias plays out not just in judging a sociopath, but for many more mundane moral violations.”
– When given a hypothetical scenario describing a fictional character who progresses from torturing animals as a child to murdering homeless people as an adult, most people assume that this person is an atheist—and that includes atheists themselves. That's what researchers at the University of Kentucky in Lexington are now reporting in the journal Human Behavior. "It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias," lead researcher and psychology professor Will Gervais says, per the Guardian. "I suspect that this stems from the prevalence of deeply entrenched pro-religious norms." Outside researchers comment alongside the study that it helps qualify the "prevalence of anti-atheist attitudes." The team presented the serial killer scenario to about 3,000 people in 13 countries spanning five continents, ranging from more secular places like Finland and the Netherlands to places with more believers, such as the US and United Arab Emirates, the Guardian notes. Most people are twice as likely to assume "extreme immorality" such as that exhibited by the hypothetical serial killer to be more suggestive of an atheist than a religious person, and the numbers are nearly as high among atheists themselves—except for in Finland and New Zealand, where the evidence wasn't as clear. The authors call it "extreme" prejudice against atheists, while the New York Times reports that mass killers are a "rogue's gallery of mostly male, aggrieved actors who are sometimes believers, sometimes not, and who half the time do not qualify for any specific psychiatric diagnosis." (Check out this list of celebrity atheists.)