First published July 15, 2021.
Do atheists have a moral compass? According to a large 2021 study, yes. Psychologist Tomas Ståhl of the University of Illinois Chicago surveyed more than 4,600 people in the United States and Sweden and found that people who do not believe in God care about harm and fairness much as believers do. Where the two groups differed was on loyalty to the group, respect for authority and ideas of sanctity, which believers rated as more important to morality.
The research, titled "The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality", was published in the journal PLOS ONE on 24 February 2021. Here is what it measured, what it found, and what it cannot tell us.
Why researchers asked the question
The idea that you need religion to be good is old and widespread. Surveys show it is still common in many countries, and experiments have found that people often assume an anonymous wrongdoer is more likely to be an atheist than a believer. Psychologists call this the "amoral atheist" stereotype.
Ståhl wanted to test whether the stereotype matched what nonbelievers actually say they value. Rather than asking a single broad question, he used established tools that break morality into several separate concerns, so that any similarities and differences could be seen clearly.
How the study worked
The paper reports four studies with a combined 4,622 participants:
- Studies 1A and 1B recruited 429 Americans online and looked at religiosity in general.
- Study 2 surveyed 2,131 people in the US and Sweden, including both believers and disbelievers.
- Study 3 recruited about 2,000 more people, roughly 500 believers and 500 disbelievers in each country.
Sweden was chosen as a contrast because it is one of the most secular societies in the world, while the United States remains comparatively religious. If the same patterns showed up in both, they would be less likely to be a quirk of one culture.
The main yardstick was Moral Foundations Theory, which groups moral intuitions into five areas: care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and sanctity versus degradation. Researchers often split these into two families: the "individualising" foundations (care and fairness), which protect individuals, and the "binding" foundations (loyalty, authority and sanctity), which hold groups together. The studies also measured attitudes to liberty and oppression, a tendency towards amoral manipulation, the value placed on rational, evidence-based belief, and how far people judge harm case by case.
What the study found
Similar on harm, fairness and liberty
Whether someone believed in God explained very little about how much they cared about protecting others from harm, treating people fairly or opposing oppression. In the first study, irreligious people were no more likely to show amoral, manipulative attitudes than religious ones. Summing up, Ståhl said that "people who do not believe in God do have a moral compass."
Different on loyalty, authority and sanctity
The clearest difference appeared in all four studies and in both countries: disbelievers gave less weight to the binding foundations. They were less likely to see obedience to authority, loyalty to one's own group, or purity and sanctity as central moral matters. The gap shrank once political views were taken into account, but it did not disappear.
More case-by-case judgements
In the third study, disbelievers were more likely to judge harmful actions by their consequences, weighing outcomes in each situation rather than following fixed rules. Ståhl suggested this difference, along with the weaker emphasis on authority and loyalty, may help explain why atheists are sometimes seen as less moral by religious people.
What might shape these differences
The paper also explored why some people do not believe. Three factors stood out. People who had seen fewer "credibility-enhancing displays" growing up, meaning they rarely saw adults around them visibly practising religion, were more likely to be disbelievers. So were people who felt less existential threat, and people with a more analytical thinking style. These same factors also went along with weaker support for the binding foundations, and together they accounted for much of the gap between believers and disbelievers on those values.
In other words, the difference may say more about upbringing, sense of security and thinking style than about religion making someone good or bad.
Limits worth knowing
The study is large and careful, but it has clear boundaries, several of which the author spells out himself:
- It is correlational. It shows which views go together, not what causes them.
- It is self-reported. Participants described their values; their actual behaviour was not observed.
- It covers two countries. Sweden and the US differ a lot, but they are both wealthy Western societies. Results might look different elsewhere.
- Belief was treated as yes or no. Most people sat at the extremes, so the analysis could not explore shades of doubt in detail.
So the fair reading is not that atheists are more moral or less moral than believers. It is that both groups share core concerns about harm and fairness, while weighing group loyalty, authority and purity differently.
How common is the belief that morality needs God?
Public opinion still leans towards the link in many places. A Pew Research Center survey of 34 countries, carried out in 2019 and published in July 2020, found a median of 45% saying belief in God is necessary to be moral and have good values. In the United States the figure was 44%. The view was much more common in poorer countries, among older adults and among people with less formal education, and much less common in Western Europe.
Politics shows the same caution. In a Gallup poll from spring 2019, 60% of Americans said they would vote for a well-qualified atheist presidential candidate from their own party, up slightly from 58% in 2015 but still lower than for most other groups Gallup asked about.
The takeaway
Being an atheist simply means not believing in God; on its own it says little about a person's values. The 2021 research supports what many people see in everyday life: kindness, honesty and fairness are found among believers and nonbelievers alike. Judging someone's character by their religious label, in either direction, is a shortcut the evidence does not support.
Sources: Ståhl, T. (2021), PLOS ONE: The amoral atheist?; Pew Research Center: The Global God Divide (2020); Gallup: Less Than Half in U.S. Would Vote for a Socialist for President (2019). Ståhl's comments were reported by IFLScience.
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