People tend to get highly emotional about issues they regard as matters of morality, and they generally attempt to avoid or even punish individuals they regard as immoral. The heated response to moral issues is the exact opposite of what many people consider rational behavior.

Or so many of us would like to think. As it turns out, a new study indicates that people regard rationality itself as a matter of moral behavior. While the study identifies a group of people who tend to take a strong and persistent moral stand about rationality, it also shows that the even the control populations tend to do this. The results could go a long way toward explaining why people have self-segregated over ideological issues and respond so heatedly to policy issues.

The study

The study comes courtesy of a team of three researchers (Tomas Ståhl, Maarten Zaal, and Linda J. Skitka), who were motivated in part by people like the New Atheists and organized groups of skeptics. These individuals, in the researchers’ view, have engaged in something akin to a crusade, trying to get everyone to abandon faith and adopt a science-focused world view. The researchers “suggest that advocates of science are frequently anything but value-neutral or amoral in their convictions about the superiority of beliefs based on rationality and scientific evidence,” and they then set out to gather some evidence.