People tend to be less accepting of atheists openly sharing their beliefs at work compared to individuals who identify as Christians, Muslims, or Jews.

According to a study published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, individuals discriminate against atheists regarding the expression of their convictions in the workplace. Across three studies, respondents were consistently less likely to say they would allow an atheist — compared to a Christian, Muslim, or Jew — to display a symbol of their ideology in the workplace. The researchers additionally found that this bias was driven by the perception that atheist employees were attempting to impose their perspectives on others.

The study’s authors, Kimberly Rios and her team, describe atheists as “one of the most disliked communities in the United States.” This disdain for atheists includes stereotypes that atheists are immoral and untrustworthy, which leads to their discrimination in fields like politics and employment. Some evidence suggests that atheists face more stigma in the U.S. than religious minorities like Muslims and Jews.

“We were curious about whether and why atheists’ requests would be accommodated less often in the workplace compared to other (religious) groups for several reasons. First, although a small number of studies have suggested that atheists are less likely than religious individuals to be hired for particular types of jobs, no research to date had examined how atheists (relative to religious individuals) are perceived in the workplace – that is, after they are employed,” explained Rios, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio University.

“Most significantly, however, we wanted to compare people’s responses to atheists and to specific religious groups. Prior work has examined perceptions of atheists versus religious individuals in general, without specifying the religion. In the United States, where Christianity is both the dominant and majority religion, people may tend to think ‘Christian’ when hearing the term ‘religious.’ But are they less inclined to accommodate atheist employees’ workplace requests than not only those of Christian and Jewish employees but also those of Muslim employees?”

“That is a particularly compelling question because both atheists and Muslims are among the most negatively stereotyped populations in American society,” Rios said. “For example, public opinion polls show that many Americans are unlikely to vote for an atheist or Muslim political leader, nor do they want their children to marry atheists or Muslims. In routine workplace situations, though, is one of these groups met with more resistance, and if so, why?”

Rios and her colleagues conducted three studies where respondents read vignettes describing either an atheist, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim employee who wanted to exhibit a symbol of their beliefs in the workplace (e.g., a belief quote inside their cubicle). After reading these scenarios, the participants were asked to rate how willing they would be to accommodate the employee’s request to express their beliefs at work.

“We looked at belief-related requests (instead of, say, willingness to give employees a raise or promotion) because we thought such requests would be less susceptible to social desirability concerns,” Rios said. “That is, an employer could explain away their reluctance to accommodate the expression of certain beliefs (or lack of beliefs) on the grounds that such beliefs should simply be kept out of the workplace… whereas it’s challenging to justify promoting or giving a raise to a member of one group over another without seeming biased against the latter group.”

In the initial study, the researchers discovered that respondents were less likely to accommodate an atheist (compared to a Christian, Jew, or Muslim) in expressing their beliefs inside their office cubicle or on their clothing (i.e., by wearing a pin).

A subsequent study replicated the above effect and further found evidence for why people tend to discriminate in this manner. Participants were more likely to feel that the atheist (compared to the religious employees) was displaying their beliefs in order to push their views on others — suggesting that the atheists posed a greater symbolic threat compared to the Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Moreover, symbolic threat mediated the relationship between the target’s religiosity and participants’ willingness to accommodate them in displaying a belief quote or wearing a symbolic pin.

In a third study, the participants were again less accepting of an employee wearing a belief pin when he/she was an atheist compared to a religious person. And again, this effect was partly explained by the belief that the atheist employee was pushing his/her views onto others. Additionally, the effect was also explained (but to a lesser extent) by the belief that the atheist was posing a threat to others’ well-being or access to resources — what the researchers termed a “realistic threat.” An example of a realistic threat was believing an employee wearing a belief pin would cause a restaurant to lose its customers.

“Participants perceived the atheist employees, more so than the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish employees, as wanting to impose their beliefs onto the workplace – in other words, as a ‘symbolic threat’ to workplace values. To a lesser extent, participants also saw the atheist employees as a ‘realistic threat’ to the workplace (i.e., as jeopardizing the company’s economic status and/or the employees’ general well-being). Both these types of threat helped explain people’s reluctance to accommodate the atheist employees’ requests,” Rios told PsyPost.

Across all three studies, atheists were given a harder time for expressing their beliefs than Christians, Jews, or Muslims were. According to the study authors, this aligns with the perception that atheists represent an outgroup, while religious groups with similar Abrahamic roots are seen as belonging to the ingroup of religious people. When analyzing the three studies together, the researchers found that religious people were the least willing to accommodate atheists’ requests to express their beliefs. It is likely that for religious respondents, the Christians, Jews, and Muslims were seen as part of the ingroup, while atheists were not.

“This likely has to do with the fact that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim individuals all fall under the broader umbrella of ‘religious,’ whereas atheists are a separate category altogether. Indeed, a combined analysis across all our studies showed that participants who self-identified as religious were especially unwilling to accommodate atheists relative to other groups,” Rios explained.

Rios and her team suggest that a productive approach to reducing these anti-atheist attitudes might be to emphasize the value of respecting others’ beliefs in the workplace — religious or otherwise. They also propose that explaining that diversity is advantageous to the success of a workplace might help eliminate the perception that atheists are a threat to the well-being of the company. The authors note that their study was limited since the participants were not real supervisors and were only reading vignettes. They propose that future studies should examine these effects among real employers to strengthen their findings.

“Now that American society is becoming more secular (with church attendance recently falling below 50% for the first time), it will be vital to determine whether and to what extent our results hold up over time,” Rios said.

The study, “Explaining Anti-Atheist Discrimination in the Workplace: The Role of Intergroup Threat”, was authored by Kimberly Rios, Leah R. Halper, and Christopher P. Scheitle.