A Puzzle Unsolved: Failure to Observe Different Effects of God and Religion Primes on Intergroup Attitudes

Religious priming has been found to have both positive and negative consequences, and recent research suggests that the activation of God-related and community-related religious cognitions may cause outgroup prosociality and outgroup derogation respectively. The present research sought to examine wh...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ramsay, Jonathan E., Tong, Eddie M. W., Pang, Joyce S., Chowdhury, Avijit
Other Authors: Allen, Philip
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/82660
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/40218
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Religious priming has been found to have both positive and negative consequences, and recent research suggests that the activation of God-related and community-related religious cognitions may cause outgroup prosociality and outgroup derogation respectively. The present research sought to examine whether reminders of God and religion have different effects on attitudes towards ingroup and outgroup members. Over two studies, little evidence was found for different effects of these two types of religious primes. In study 1, individuals primed with the words “religion”, “God” and a neutral control word evaluated both ingroup and outgroup members similarly, although a marginal tendency towards more negative evaluations of outgroup members by females exposed to religion primes was observed. In study 2, no significant differences in attitudes towards an outgroup member were observed between the God, religion, and neutral priming conditions. Furthermore, the gender effect observed in study 1 did not replicate in this second study. Possible explanations for these null effects are discussed.