Cheryl Says She's An Atheist

[koganbot]

Proposal for a social psychology experiment:

We'll use four separate, sizable groups of people, say 75 people in each group. (Not that I know if that amount is any good or not, or if we want our overall pool to be similar socioeconomically. I'm not a statistician.)

Ask each member of Group One:

What arguments would you use to try and persuade an

Comments

[koganbot]

The question is clear but doesn't give enough information (it doesn't tell us why Cheryl is an atheist, it doesn't tell us what she thinks being an atheist means, it doesn't tell us what she thinks believing in a God means, and of course it doesn't tell us what sort of arguments persuade her; some people think it's persuasive to tell someone "You're not being open-minded"). You're mostly right in saying the question is asking "How do you persuade her to be an agnostic?" except that "There might be a God after all" is actually a bit stronger than "I don't know if there is or isn't a God," which just says that you can't prove otherwise. (And there are other definitions of "agnosticism" too, that I won't go into.) I'd say, following along with what you wrote, that in responding to questions, people (incl. me) respond to the question that is intended rather than the question that is literally asked. And we're right to do so, if we know what question is intended. But people also tend - this is inescapable, but some people are more prone to this than others - not to notice that they've substituted the intended question for the literal, and may in fact have been mistaken as to the intended question. Ditto, people may forget to consider that what was said may not be the question that the questioner actually intended to ask.

But what I'm specifically after in this experiment is to test the hypothesis that people way underestimate how much information they don't have and how much uncertainty they should have (I might say "in general," though this experiment doesn't test the "general," instead picks an issue where there ought to be very high uncertainty), and to test if, by adding a name and shifting the question order, we can increase the uncertainty and the desire for more information.

Any knowledge I get about actual attitudes and arguments and beliefs regarding God and atheists is gravy. Unfortunately, I doubt this experiment will ever take place (I'm not in position to conduct it), and it probably wouldn't work anyway, the question being too daunting for many of the participants. But maybe if we ran the experiment on people we assume are motivated to answer - college students, churchgoers - we still might get useful answers (a hypothesis being that we get a significantly different response from members of Group Four than Group One, for instance, no matter the social makeup of the subjects; which doesn't mean that, if we use a socially homogeneous bunch of subjects, we don't have to then try the experiment on a bunch that's socially different from the first one). Anyway, this is a thought experiment more than anything else, and an oblique commentary on my world.