Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to researchers at a Catholic university. <\/p>\n
A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are are actually less tolerant to differing opinions and ideas. <\/p>\n
Religious believers \"seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives\", according to psychology researchers at the private Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium's largest French-speaking university. <\/p>\n
Filip Uzarevic, who co-wrote the paper, said his message was that \"closed-mindedness is not necessarily found only among the religious\". <\/p>\n
He told Psypost: \"In our study, the relationship between religion and closed-mindedness depended on the specific aspect of closed-mindedness. <\/p>\n
Somewhat surprisingly, when it came to subtly measured inclination to integrate views that were diverging and contrary to ones own perspectives, it was the religious who showed more openness.\" <\/p>\n
Dr Uzarevic's paper, called \"are atheists undogmatic?\", states that \"irreligion has become normative\" in some Western countries. <\/p>\n
He inspected three aspects of mental rigidity in 445 atheists and agnostics, 255 Christians, and a group of 37 Bhuddists, Muslims, and Jews. <\/p>\n
The study claims that non-believers measured lower than religious people in \"self-reported dogmatism\", but were higher in \"subtly-measured intolerance\". <\/p>\n
Dr Uzarevic said: \"The idea started through noticing that, in public discourse, despite both the conservative\/religious groups and liberal\/secular groups showing strong animosity towards the opposite ideological side, somehow it was mostly the former who were often labeled as closed-minded. <\/p>\n
Moreover, such view of the secular being more tolerant and open seemed to be dominant in the psychological literature. <\/p>\n
The findings also said that the strength of a person's belief in either atheism or religion is directly correlated to how intolerant they are. <\/p>\n
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Link: Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to researchers at a Catholic university. A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are are actually less tolerant to differing opinions and ideas Continue reading
\nAtheists are less open-minded than religious people, study claims - The Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"