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(a) Did the independent variable have an effect on the main…
(a) 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.
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)52.25, p5.032, prep5.91, d50.84, 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)51.34, p5.19,
prep5.73. 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, p5.29, prep5.65. 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
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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 religious prime
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.
