Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Epiphenom

Home
About

Home
Nonreligious
Subliminal religious prompts might not make people nicer after all

Subliminal religious prompts might not make people nicer after all

Last updated on: September 11, 2015 at 3:18 pm by Epiphenom

Subliminal religious prompts might not make people nicer after all 2015-09-11T15:18:26+01:00 Epiphenom

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Back in 2007, right when I was starting this blog, a ground breaking study revealed an extra-ordinary finding. What the researchers had discovered was that just giving people subliminal reminders of religion was enough to make them be more generous in a something called the dictator game.

The really extraordinary thing was that the same effect was seen in both religious and non-religious people.

When I blogged about it at the time, I was a little sceptical about that. It seems that Cristina Gomes and Mike McCullough at the University of Miami were a little sceptical as well, because they decided to replicate the study to see what results they got.

The setup was pretty simple. They asked their subjects to unscramble some sentences. Just as in the original study, some of the subjects received jumbled sentences with religious phrases, and some received only secular phrases. In a twist to the original, in the new study they also gave some subjects secular phrases with religious words in to unscramble (like: “dessert divine was fork the”).

The idea is that the subjects who unscrambled the phrases with religious words would be subliminally reminded of religion, and change their behaviour as a result.

As a simple test of generosity, the researchers then gave their subjects ten dollar notes and told them that they were free to leave as much or as little as they wanted, anonymously, to a future participant.

The result: the religious primes had absolutely no effect.

The graphic shows the distribution of how much was given. You can see that about a third gave nothing, a third gave $5, and third more ultra-generous individuals gave over the full $10.

The different coloured bars shows each of the three different sentence types people received. Looking at it you might think there are a few differences, but statistically they are meaningless. Not only that, but even looking at, for example, religious versus non-religious, or rich versus poor, or men versus women, gave the same negative results.

Now, there are several possible explanations for why Gomes and McCullough got different results from previous researchers. Their subjects weren’t university students, and they were more culturally and socially diverse (and more generous!).

But in my opinion the most likely factor was simply that they included far more people in their experiment.

The original experiment was rather small – only 50 people. And it fell short on statistical rigour for a number of reasons. It’s possible that what seemed that a statistically significant effect was just the result of chance.

Gomes and McCullough make all these points. But the clincher for me comes in another analysis they put in their paper. They did what’s called a ‘meta-analysis’, pulling together all the different results from similar studies to get an idea of what the big picture looks like.

They point out that the big picture suggests that there really is nothing to see here. But when I look at the figure they present it screams something else to me: publication bias.

Publication bias happens when people do lots of small studies, but only publish the ones with positive results. Often that’s done with the best of intentions. After all, there’s any number of reasons why a study might fail, and journal generally aren’t interested in negative results.

But of course if there was no real effect to be seen then you’d expect some experiments to come out negative and some positive, just by chance. When publication bias is at work all the small studies that get published look positive – the negative ones are missing. It’s only when someone does a big study that you get the convincing negative result.

And that’s exactly what Gomes and McCullough’s meta-analysis shows. A bunch of small, positive studies and one big negative study.

I suspect that much of the discussion about the subliminal, pro-social effect of religion may have been a case of smoke and mirrors.

That doesn’t mean that the effect doesn’t occur. After all there’s plenty of evidence from other studies that being in a religious environment can change behaviour – sometimes in unexpected ways (see this and this and this, for example) But it seems that a simple task of giving people sentences with religious words in is not enough to change their behaviour.

Incidentally, they did find that women gave more than men, and English Speakers gave more than Spanish speakers. But that fascinating finding is out of scope for this blog!

Gomes, C., & McCullough, M. (2015). The Effects of Implicit Religious Primes on Dictator Game Allocations: A Preregistered Replication Experiment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/xge0000027

Effects of religion - psychological

Charity

Priming

Prosocial

Previous Post

September 2, 2015

What kind of countries go to war?

Next Post

September 17, 2015 Make people uncertain then remind them about God, and they become more fearful of sin

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Causes of religion - evolution Causes of religion - psychological Causes of religion - social Demographics Digest Effects of religion - health Effects of religion - psychological Effects of religion - social Notifications Politics Uncategorized

Select a Month March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

I was breathing out murderous threats, but a blinding light changed everything. I became the greatest missionary the church has known. Who am I?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Stephen Barnabas Peter Saul