The prosocial effects of explicit and implicit reward-related religious primes

Abstract

There is a growing body of empirical literature exploring how the priming of religious concepts influences prosociality. While many studies have used broad sets of religious primes covering a wide range of religious concepts, many recent studies have demonstrated that specific categories of religious primes (e.g., forgiveness- and punishment-related) differentially influence prosociality. However, only one study (Harrell, 2012) has explored the prosocial effects of reward-related religious primes. I conducted three priming studies to further test Harrell's hypothesis that reward-related religious primes can positively influence prosociality (i.e., the supernatural reward hypothesis or SRH; see Saleam & Moustafa, 2016). Studies 1 and 2 explored the effects of generic and culturally-sensitive explicit reward-related religious primes, respectively, on the generosity of religious participants in the Dictator Game. Study 3 explored the effects of implicit reward-related religious primes on the generosity of religious participants in a charitable giving task. Neither explicit priming study yielded data supportive of the SRH; however, participants exposed to reward-related religious primes in Study 3, who expressed awareness of the reward-relevance of the primes, did exhibit greater generosity than participants who interpreted those same primes as being relevant to divine mercifulness. These participants also gave more generously than participants exposed to reward-related secular primes, neutral religious primes, or control primes. Collectively, these findings demonstrate the need to distinguish between concepts of divine reward and divine forgiveness/mercifulness when testing the SRH. However, given the results across these three studies, it is unclear whether reward-related religious concepts do effectively promote prosociality.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English