God, Can I Give Up?: The Diverging Effects of God-Related Thoughts on Task Persistence in Chinese Buddhists and Taoists

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous research has indicated that religiosity and engagement in faith practices are associated with increased task persistence. However, in this study, we sought to challenge this long-standing assumption by demonstrating that priming God-related concepts can actually lead to reduced task persistence in Taoism, a religion emphasizing passivity, calmness, and inaction. To investigate this theoretical perspective, we conducted two experimental studies using different behavioral measures of task persistence (anagram task and mirror-tracing task) and diverse religious priming techniques (the scrambled-sentence task and religious reading task). In Study 1, when Chinese Taoists were first reminded of God and then completed an unsolvable anagram task purported to measure the maturation of verbal abilities, they exhibited lower levels of task persistence than those in the neutral prime condition. In Study 2, we found that Taoist participants exposed to God-related primes spent less time on tracing a difficult geometric figures, indicating lower levels of task persistence. Across two studies, we replicated prior findings that exposure to God representations increased task persistence in Chinese Buddhists, who belong to a non-Abraham religious group. These results provided the first experimental evidence that activating thoughts of God may have divergent effects on task persistence in members of different religions.