Did the independent variable have an effect on the main dependent variable in Study 1? What were the means for each level of the independent variable?
Report the t-test, identifying whether the mean difference is significant or not.
(b) In Study 2, what were the means for the secular prime and the God prime and how did they compare to the control condition?
What do these results mean in reference to the research question being investigated in Study 2?
Shariff, A. F., & Norenzayan, A. (2007). God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game. Psychological Science, 18(9), 803-809
Study 1:
Method Subjects Fifty subjects (mean age 5 21 years; 34 females and 16 males) were recruited through posters displayed at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and randomly assigned to either the religious-prime or the no-prime condition.
Twenty-six indicated identification with a religion, and 24 did not. Of the religious subjects, 19 identified themselves as Christians, 4 as Buddhists, 2 as Jews, and 1 as a Muslim.
Of the remaining 24 subjects, 19 were categorized as atheists and 5 as theists without an organized religion.
Subjects were defined as atheists if they both indicated ”none” for religion and scored below the midpoint of the scale on a question assessing belief in God.
Subjects who did not indicate a religious identification but nonetheless scored higher than the midpoint on the belief-in-God question were categorized as theists, along with those who did state specific religious identifications. Procedure and Materials All subjects were seated in private rooms behind closed doors for the duration of the experiment.
Half of the subjects were implicitly primed with God concepts using the scrambled-sentence paradigm of Srull and Wyer (1979). The other half received no prime. Following this task, each subject played a oneshot, anonymous version of the dictator game (Hoffman, McCabe, Shachat, & Smith, 1994) against a confederate posing as another subject.
All actual subjects were given the following instructions: You have been chosen as the giver in this economic decisionmaking task. You will find 10 one-dollar coins. Your role is to take and keep as many of these coins as you would like, knowing that however many you leave, if any, will be given to the receiver subject to keep.
To free subjects from reputational concerns, we assured them that only the other subject would know what they decided and that their identity would be hidden from that subject. Once they had made their decision, they completed a number of measures assessing religious belief and requesting demographic information.
Each subject was then debriefed (both in writing and verbally) regarding the deception and the true aims of the experiment, compensated for participating, thanked, and dismissed.
For the priming manipulation (Srull & Wyer, 1979), subjects were required to unscramble 10 five-word sentences, dropping an extraneous word from each to create a grammatical fourword sentence. For example, ”felt she eradicate spirit the” would become ”she felt the spirit,” and ”dessert divine was fork the” would become ”the dessert was divine.”
Five of the scrambled sentences contained the target words spirit, divine, God, sacred, and prophet, and the other 5 contained only neutral words unrelated to religion, and forming no other coherent concept. Results and Discussion Previous research has demonstrated that the majority of givers act selfishly in this anonymous game, leaving little or no money for the receiver, although some prosocial behavior is observed even in anonymous one-shot games (Haley & Fessler, 2005; Hoffman et al., 1994). This selfish tendency was confirmed in our control condition. Subjects who received no prime left, on average, $1.84 for the other subject, with 52% leaving $1 or less, only 12% leaving $5, and none leaving more than $5.
Those who were primed with God concepts left, on average, $4.22, with 64% leaving $5 or more.
The average amount of money left was $2.38 more in the religious-prime condition, a considerable difference, t(48) 5 3.69, p < .001, prep 5 .99, d 5 1.07.
A comparison of subjects who left either nothing or $5 showed that a higher proportion of subjects behaved selfishly (offering nothing) in the control condition (36%) than in the religiousprime condition (16%), whereas a higher proportion behaved fairly (offering exactly $5) in the religious-prime condition (52%) than in the control condition (12%), w2 (1, N 5 29) 5 7.5, p 5 .006, prep 5 .96, shifting the modal response from selfishness to fairness (see Fig. 1).
This effect was present for both theists (prime-control difference of $1.88), t(29) 5 2.25, p 5 .032, prep 5 .91, d 5 0.84, and atheists (prime-control difference of $2.95), t(17) 5 2.70, p 5 .015, prep 5 .94, d 5 1.31.
Although unprimed atheists left slightly less than did unprimed theists ($0.97), this trend was weak and was not statistically significant, t(23) 5 1.34, p 5 .19, prep 5 .73. Self-reported belief in God, as a continuous measure, was not a good predictor of how much subjects left in the control condition, r(24) 5 .23, p 5 .29, prep 5 .65.
In summary, implicit priming of God concepts did increase prosocial behavior (i.e., increased how much subjects left for an anonymous stranger), and this effect was observed for both theists and atheists.
The 804 Volume 18—Number 9 God Concepts and Prosocial Behavior implicit religious prime proved to be much more effective at curtailing selfish behavior than was explicit religious belief.
Although these findings are compelling, their generalizability is limited by our reliance on a student sample.
The behavior of such samples in economic games can be unrepresentative of larger, more heterogeneous populations in the world (Henrich et al., 2005). Moreover, the results of this study are open to the criticism that the control group did not receive a neutral prime.
It is conceivable, although implausible, that merely being primed with words, rather than with religious concepts specifically, led to the difference between the control and religiousprime conditions.
Moreover, we did not specifically establish that the implicit religious prime indeed affected behavior without reflective awareness of the subjects. All of these concerns were addressed in the second study.
