White Cindel J M, Mosley Ariel J, Solomon Larisa Heiphetz
York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
University of California, Davis, USA.
Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2024 Aug;15(6):670-681. doi: 10.1177/19485506231195915. Epub 2023 Sep 21.
Four experiments investigated the perceived virtue of curiosity about religion. Adults from the United States made moral judgments regarding targets who exhibited curiosity, possessed relevant knowledge, or lacked both curiosity and knowledge about religion and comparison topics (e.g., science). Participants attributed greater moral goodness to targets who displayed curiosity compared with targets who were ignorant or knowledgeable about the domain. This preference was consistent across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and other Christian participants but was absent when atheists evaluated religious curiosity. Perceptions of effort partially mediated judgments: Participants viewed curious characters as exerting more effort and consequently rated them as more moral. To test causality, we manipulated perceptions of effort and showed that participants viewed curious characters who exerted effort as particularly moral. This work fosters novel insights into the perceived virtue of curiosity and further illuminates similarities and differences between religious and scientific cognition.
四项实验研究了对宗教的好奇心所被感知到的美德。来自美国的成年人对那些表现出好奇心、拥有相关知识，或对宗教及比较主题（如科学）既缺乏好奇心又缺乏知识的目标人物进行了道德判断。与那些对该领域无知或有知识的目标人物相比，参与者将更大的道德善归因于表现出好奇心的目标人物。这种偏好在犹太教、新教、天主教和其他基督教参与者中是一致的，但在无神论者评估宗教好奇心时则不存在。对努力的认知部分地介导了判断：参与者认为好奇的人物付出了更多努力，因此将他们评为更有道德。为了测试因果关系，我们操纵了对努力的认知，并表明参与者认为付出努力的好奇人物特别有道德。这项工作为好奇心所被感知到的美德带来了新的见解，并进一步阐明了宗教认知和科学认知之间的异同。
