Priming disbelief in God increases prejudice against the religious

Priming religion and belief in God often increases prejudice toward targets threatening religious values, including atheists. Does the reverse also exist, i.e. priming disbelief in God increasing prejudice toward those threatening secular worldviews? We hypothesized this will be the case with atheism, i.e. full rejection of gods’ existence, but not agnosticism, i.e. scepticism toward god’s existence. Randomly assigned into three groups, 224 UK students read few sentences advocating (1) atheism, (2) agnosticism, or (3) describing a neutral topic (production of toothpicks). Then, participants rated their willingness to vote for four political candidates, whose fictitious profile comprised being Christian or non-religious, and British vs. Chinese. Priming disbelief in God, but not agnosticism, increased nonbelievers’ prejudice toward the Christian target, but not ethnic prejudice. This study suggests that atheist ideas implicitly activate nonbelievers’ discomfort with people who may not be fundamentalists but simply belong to the world major religions