To Err in their Ways: The Attribution Biases of the New Atheists

Abstract

The term ‘‘new atheism’’ has been given to the recent barrage of anti-religion and anti-God books written by Richard Dawkins (2006), Sam Harris (2004, 2008), Christopher Hitchens (2007), Daniel Dennett (2006), and others. This paper contends that one of the fundamental arguments put forth by the new atheists — that religion poisons everything or that religion is responsible for much of the evil in the world — falls victim to one of the best established theories of interpersonal and intergroup relations in social psychology: the fundamental attribution error. Insights gleaned from social psychology are especially useful for critiquing the new atheism. Instead of simply arguing that the new atheists ‘‘over-generalize,’’ social psychological studies on the nature of individual and group attribution provide the tools needed to launch a more substantive critique.