Adults Show Positive Moral Evaluations of Curiosity about Religion
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Four experiments investigated the perceived virtue of curiosity about religion. Adults from the United States made moral judgments regarding targets who exhibited curiosity, possessed relevant knowledge, or lacked both curiosity and knowledge about religion and comparison topics (e.g., science). Participants attributed greater moral goodness to targets who displayed curiosity compared to targets who were ignorant or knowledgeable about the domain. This preference was consistent across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and other Christian participants, but was absent when atheists evaluated religious curiosity. Perceptions of effort partially mediated judgments: participants viewed curious characters as exerting more effort and consequently rated them as more moral. To test causality, we manipulated perceptions of effort and showed that participants viewed curious characters who exerted effort as particularly moral. This work fosters novel insights into the perceived virtue of curiosity and further illuminates similarities and differences between religious and scientific cognition.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it