In one of the experiments that followed, 262 participants recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk were presented with a hypothetical scenario: a doctor (Richard) was presented with a devoutly Christian patient (Mary) with diffuse symptoms. In both narratives, Richard told Mary to pray for her health. In one version the doctor did so in order to harness a placebo effect; in the other, he did so because he thought that God answers prayers. The higher people scored on MR, the more upset they said they were about the prayer prescription and the more they wanted Richard punished.

The most compelling experiment examined people’s “moral foundations,” a theory that’s gained lots of steam over the past couple years as a way of showing how liberals and conservatives have different ethical priorities — liberals care more about fairness and reciprocity, while conservatives emphasize loyalty and purity. In this experiment, 311 volunteers filled out the MR quiz and then read descriptions for fictitious charities that embodied different moral foundations: Project Compassion, for “care/harm”; Justice for All, for “fairness/cheating”; Giving Back to our Heroes, for “loyalty/betrayal”; In the Line of Duty, for “authority/subversion”; and Worth the Wait, for sanctity/degradation. The sixth charity was Skeptic Alliance, described as “an American nonprofit organization devoted to preventing the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and other kinds of irrational beliefs.” As you might predict, people who scored high on moralized rationality were more likely to say they would volunteer at or donate to Skeptic Alliance over the other nonprofits. For some, rationality is a moral conviction, to the point that it guides impulses around activism, at least in the case of this study.