What’s hidden in my filedrawer and what’s in yours? Disclosing non-published findings in the cognitive science of religion

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite recent developments to improve the transparency of scientific research, the field is in need of a new and effective way to communicate non-significant or unpublished findings to a broader audience. In this short report, I present an overview of different unpublished studies that we conducted in my lab over the past years. Across the different studies we observed consistent effects of our experimental manipulations or variables of interest on self-report measures, but less so on behavioral and neurocognitive measures. For instance, religious people said they were more prosocial but did not donate more money (Study 1 and 2); participants experienced awe but this did not affect their body and self perception (Study 6 and 7); participants had mystical-like experiences but this did not affect the perception of their peripersonal space (Study 8 and 9); and self-reported magical thinking was unrelated to superstitious behavior (Study 11). In other studies, the hypothesized effects did not bear out as expected or were even in an unexpected direction. Participants perceived more agency in threatening pictures and scenarios, but this was not related to their supernatural beliefs (Study 3–5) and a death priming manipulation reduced rather than increased participants’ religiosity (Study 10). Thus, opening the filedrawer through the publication of short reports will hopefully further increase transparency and will help other researchers to learn from our own trials and errors.