psychology, cognition, biasAnd why? Here is a list of biases for your convenience.
I am trying to figure out when an average atheist’s mental performance is worse than that of an average human who is not explicitly atheist, so that the performance in question could be improved.
I’d say none. It’s like (or it SHOULD be like*) saying, “What biases would a person who doesn’t like pie suffer from more than an average person?”
You have a perspective on the existence of god. You’re going to have confirmation biases there, but that’s no different from a theist. Optimism isn’t correlated with religious beliefs (amusingly), so that doesn’t change. You might be able to successfully argue that religion and wishful thinking are related, but I can’t think of another that would really be specific to your theological perspective.
*If you’re really REALLY emotionally vested in other peoples god delusion, that’s scary in its own right.
We tend to be biased against religion, and overtly religious folks. That seems like a pretty obvious answer, but in my experience most people who bother to call themselves atheists do so because they’ve had one or more strong negative experiences with believers. The use of ‘Bias’ in common speech is negative, but the definition you’ve provided allows for the possibility that a bias can be a useful understanding based on experience, and this is how I would define my own bias against obviously faith-based ideas.
Since a lack of belief doesn’t say anything positive, give me some latitude here.
I think most of us consider our position to be based on rationality and science. That is, we base our views on truth more than the next man. After time, I could see us succumbing to some arrogance in our arguments. Maybe even getting lazy and not always doing our homework.
Good question. This is a generalization; but, I’ll go with morality. (And, whatever bias is responsible for thinking that being slightly better, and obviously so, can justify an otherwise uninformed stance.)
The average Christian doesn’t have to deal with the woes of moral relativity: they get to leave the discourse by fiat. We however have to deal with it, if not in practice at least conversationally as the minority always on the defensive. Now, I’ll admit that even a rudimentary understanding of absolute morality is enough to offend the average Christian to the point where they don’t want to entertain the subject, but that shouldn’t really suffice a thoughtful person. And, it often suffices other atheists I’ve met in person. Rather than go into too much detail here, I’ll pose a single question:
These types of questions are supposed to provoke thought. I often see them answered with mere refutations of absolute morality.
I would say we are biased against the value of groups and community, especially in terms of working together for political gain. We let our strain of individualism get in the way of productive/constructive group relations, sometimes to our detriment. Believers are VERY effective at using groups to their political advantage.
The typical bias is, that a person belongs to a group A and not to group B, and believes, A is better than B.
Since atheism has nothing to do with sports, no one would an atheist expect to be biased about that topic. But every topic which has to do with atheism: moral, thought, knowledge for example, could be a good subject for biased beliefs.
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