Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to just published research.

A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are actually less tolerant of differing opinions and ideas. Religious believers “seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives”, according to psychology researchers at the University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium’s largest French-speaking university.

Filip Uzarevic, who co-wrote the paper, admitted his surprise at the finding that, “when it came to subtly measured inclination to integrate views that were diverging and contrary to one’s own perspectives, it was the religious who showed more openness.”

Dr Uzarevic’s paper, called “are atheists undogmatic?”, examined mental rigidity in three different groups: atheists and agnostics; Christians; and a group of Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews.  The study claims that non-believers measured lower than religious people in “self-reported dogmatism”, but were higher in “subtly-measured intolerance”.