Religious Priming Research Articles

Priming social affiliation promotes morality – Regardless of religion

Whilst prior studies have shown religious priming spurs prosocial behavior, there is little evidence this is unique to religion. It could be that priming any social affiliation encourages prosocial behavior simply by representing, belonging, and being responsible to a group, as opposed to acting as an individual. The current study aims to test if priming social affiliation is associated with greater moral self-perception. Using a large sample (N=801), this study included an experimental manipulation to tease out if the previously-demonstrated priming effects that increase morality may be unique to religious affiliation or are general to any meaningful social affiliation. Results showed priming social affiliation had a unique influence on morality. This priming effect was not different for those with a religious affiliation when compared to people with a non-religious affiliation. Religious affiliates may see themselves as more moral, and priming their religious affiliation did indeed induce greater morality, but this was also true for other social affiliations. Therefore, religion is not fundamental to moral priming, and it is likely to be the perceived benefits of being in a group that enhances prosociality. We discussed implications of belonging to a social group on morality and prosociality.

A call to honesty: extending religious priming of moral behavior to Middle Eastern Muslims.

Two experiments with Middle Eastern participants explored the generalizability of prior research on religious priming and moral behavior to a novel cultural and religious context. Participants in Experiment 1 completed a sentence unscrambling task with religious or non-religious content (in Arabic) before taking an unsupervised math test on which cheating was possible and incentivized. No difference in honesty rates emerged between the two groups, failing to extend findings from previous research with similar stimuli. Experiment 2 tested the effects of the athan, the Islamic call to prayer, using the same design. This naturalistic religious prime produced higher rates of honesty (68%) compared to controls who did not hear the call to prayer (53%).These results raise the possibility that the psychological mechanisms used by religion to influence moral behavior might differ between religions and cultures, highlighting an avenue of exploration for future research. The experiments here also address two growing concerns in psychological science: that the absence of replications casts doubt on the reliability of original research findings, and that the Westernized state of psychological science casts doubt on the generalizability of such work.

Rethinking Value Violation: Priming Religion Increases Prejudice in Singaporean Christians and Buddhists

Ingroup religious priming has been shown to increase prejudice in American Christians, but it is currently unknown whether this effect can be generalized to other religions and cultures. The present research assessed the effects of religious priming on attitudes toward religious and cultural outgroups in Christian and Buddhist students at a Singapore university. Both Christians and Buddhists primed with religious ingroup words demonstrated more negative pretest to posttest attitude change toward homosexuals than those primed with neutral words. This effect remained even when statistically controlling for levels of right-wing authoritarianism and spirituality. These results indicate that religious priming affects Christians and Buddhists in the same way, promoting bias towards culturally relevant outgroups even in the absence of religious value-violation. This suggests that religion may exert its prejudicial effects indirectly through activation of associated cultural value systems, such as traditionalism/conservatism.

Representations of Religious Words: Insights for Religious Priming Research

Researchers often expose participants to a series of words (e.g., religion, God, faith) to activate religious concepts and observe their subsequent effects on people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This research has revealed many important effects of experimentally manipulated religious cognition in domains ranging from prosocial behavior to prejudice. However, it is not exactly clear what constitutes a “religious cognition,” and no research has yet investigated conceptual distinctions between different kinds of religious prime words. In the present research we used a card‐sorting task to examine laypeople's subjective understanding of religious prime words, and the central categories or dimensions of these religious concepts. Using multidimensional scaling, property fitting, and cluster analysis methods to analyze the proximities among the words, we find evidence for the mental representation of three relatively distinct kinds of religious concepts: agents (e.g., God, angel), spiritual/abstract (e.g., faith, belief), and institutional/concrete (e.g., shrine, scripture). Theoretical and methodological impli‐cations for religious priming research are discussed.

Religiosity and Prosociality

Religion is a phenomenon evident in every culture. Different types of religion exist depending on the group of believers, the number of gods worshiped and the representations of these gods. However, one commonality the three largest religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) share is prosociality. They all are based on the notion of sharing, donating and helping others. In some of them, there is actually a prerequisite to support the image of the righteous. The purpose of this study is to investigate if religiosity predicts prosociality through a structured literature review. The key-words used were “religion”, “religiousness”, “prosociality”, “prosocial behaviour”, “blood donation” and other words related to these issues. The studies retrieved are dated from 2005 to 2010. The databases used were EBSCO, Sheffield University, PUBMED, and others of psychological and sociological interest. The main hypothesis of the study is that religiosity is positively correlated with prosociality. Secondary hypothesis is that religious priming, both subliminal and direct, will affect religious and, also, non- religious individuals in promoting and enhancing prosocial behaviour. Our conclusions are that (a) religiosity predicts prosociality and (b) priming affects both groups for different reasons.

Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: a case study from Mauritius

Social scientists and folk wisdom have both claimed that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behavior, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality; however, this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviors. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviors, and these effects are evident irrespective of the degree of religiosity of the participant. Building on and combining the strengths of previous field designs, I report on the results of a field experiment in Mauritius examining the effects of religious environments on cooperation in a naturalistic setting. These results were consistent with previous findings that religious cues increase cooperation. Importantly, this effect was not dependent on degrees of prior religiosity. Plausible interpretations of such effects are discussed.

Courting Christians: How Political Candidates Prime Religious Considerations in Campaign Ads

Religion occupies a central role in American politics. From being an impetus behind numerous political movements, to shaping how political candidates are considered, scholars and pundits alike have emphasized the role of religion for political behavior and attitudes. Yet, there has been a scarcity of empirical work examining the consequences of religious appeals in campaigns. Drawing on recent work that contends views about religious traditionalism have replaced many interdenominational differences in vote choice and issue attitudes, we argue that religious cues activate religious traditionalism, which subsequently influences how political candidates are considered. In a priming experiment administered to a representative cross-section of adults, we examine whether religious priming occurs. By manipulating the participant’s information environment, we also examine whether there are limits to priming. We find strong evidence religious traditionalism is activated when religious cues are embedded in campaign ads, but we find priming effects are reduced when participants are provided information about the candidate. While religious cues have the potential to shape how candidates are evaluated, we argue the consequences of religious cues are dampened among those who learn more about political issues and candidates.

When authoritarianism meets religion: Sacrificing others in the name of abstract deontology

Authoritarianism is a stable construct in terms of individual differences (social attitudes based on personality and values), but its manifestations and behavioral outcomes may depend on contextual factors. In the present experiment, we investigated whether authoritarianism is sensitive to religious influences in predicting rigid morality. Specifically, we investigated whether authoritarians, after supraliminal religious priming, would show, in hypothetical moral dilemmas, preference for impersonal societal norms even at the detriment of interpersonal, care-based prosociality toward proximal persons and acquaintances in need. The results confirmed the expectations, with a small effect size for the religious priming × authoritarianism interaction. In addition, these results were specific to participants' authoritarianism and not to their individual religiosity. The interaction between authoritarian dispositions and religious ideas may constitute a powerful combination leading to behaviors that are detrimental for the well-being and the life of others, even proximal people, in the name of abstract deontology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Beyond Mere Compliance to Authoritative Figures: Religious Priming Increases Conformity to Informational Influence Among Submissive People

Religious priming activates submissive thoughts and facilitates compliance to authority's request for revenge among individuals with high dispositional submissiveness (Saroglou, Corneille, & Van Cappellen, 2009). The present experiment examines another key social influence issue: the effect of religious priming on informational conformity. Participants primed with subtle religious or control cues were asked to complete a numeric estimation task. In this task, they were left free to use or disregard numeric estimates allegedly provided by peers for reporting their own numeric decision. Results revealed that participants assimilated their estimates to that of their peers more after religious than control priming, at least for participants scoring higher on dispositional submissiveness. This finding adds to current research concerned with the impact of religious priming in social cognition and behavior.

Wrath of God: religious primes and punishment

Recent evidence indicates that priming participants with religious concepts promotes prosocial sharing behaviour. In the present study, we investigated whether religious priming also promotes the costly punishment of unfair behaviour. A total of 304 participants played a punishment game. Before the punishment stage began, participants were subliminally primed with religion primes, secular punishment primes or control primes. We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviours for a subset of our participants--those who had previously donated to a religious organization. We discuss two proximate mechanisms potentially underpinning this effect. The first is a 'supernatural watcher' mechanism, whereby religious participants punish unfair behaviours when primed because they sense that not doing so will enrage or disappoint an observing supernatural agent. The second is a 'behavioural priming' mechanism, whereby religious primes activate cultural norms pertaining to fairness and its enforcement and occasion behaviour consistent with those norms. We conclude that our results are consistent with dual inheritance proposals about religion and cooperation, whereby religions harness the byproducts of genetically inherited cognitive mechanisms in ways that enhance the survival prospects of their adherents.

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR.

We find using laboratory experiments that primes that make religion salient cause subjects to identify more with their religion and affect their economic choices. The effect on choices varies by religion. For example, priming causes Protestants to increase contributions to public goods, whereas Catholics decrease contributions to public goods, expect others to contribute less to public goods, and become less risk averse. A simple model implies that priming effects reveal the sign of the marginal impact of religious norms on preferences. We find no evidence of religious priming effects on disutility of work effort, discount rates, or dictator game generosity.

“Speak, Lord, Your Servant Is Listening”: Religious Priming Activates Submissive Thoughts and Behaviors

According to many theoretical perspectives, religion is positively associated with submission and conformity. However, no study to date provided experimental evidence for this hypothesis. We did so in two experiments that relied on priming procedures. In Experiment 1, participants were tested for the strength of their religion-submission associations by using a lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, participants were primed with either religious or neutral concepts and were invited or not by the experimenter to take revenge on an individual who had allegedly criticized them. Both studies provided evidence for the expected religion-submission association, although the effects were limited to participants scoring high in personal submissiveness. Among these individuals, religious priming increased the accessibility of submission-related concepts (Experiment 1) and the acceptance of a morally problematic request for revenge (Experiment 2). Discussion focuses on questions for future research and implications for our understanding of religion's role in morality and interpersonal relations.

An Examination of Religious Priming and Intrinsic Religious Motivation in the Moral Hypocrisy Paradigm

Reliable individual differences have not yet been identified in moral hypocrisy. This research examined whether intrinsic religious motivation combined with an experimental religious priming manipulation would predict decreased moral hypocrisy. A sample of Christian college students (N=142) completed the Religious Orientation Scale—Revised, and the moral motivation paradigm, which tests whether participants will act in accordance with their moral beliefs at a cost to themselves. Half the participants received religious priming prior to the procedure. Intrinsic religiosity predicted decreased moral hypocrisy, but only when religiosity was primed. Findings support Allport's view of intrinsic religiosity, but with an emphasis on cognitive processes in addition to motivational ones.