God May save your Life, but you have to Find your Own Keys

Abstract

Previous research has found that people make religious attributions under certain conditions. In this study, we used causally ambiguous vignettes to confirm some previous findings regarding religious attributions and extend these findings by testing: (a) whether implicit priming increased the odds of making causal attributions, and (b) whether atheists also exhibit an attribution bias. Like previous studies, we found that people who were less religious (i.e., atheists in our study) were substantially less likely to make religious causal attributions. Unlike previous studies, we found that atheists were more likely to attribute events to probability and/or luck. We also found, like previous studies, that religious people were more likely to make causal attributions when presented with vignettes involving health-related or life-and-death situations but not with quotidian events, like losing one's keys. Finally, we found no effect for implicit religious priming.