Religious Priming
Priming has emerged as a valuable tool within the psychological study of religion, allowing for tests of religion's causal effect on a number of psychological outcomes, such as prosocial behavior. As the literature has grown, questions about the reliability and boundary conditions of religious priming have arisen. We use a combination of traditional effect size analyses, p curve analyses, and adjustments for publication bias to evaluate the robustness of four types of religious priming (Analyses 1 3) review the empirical evidence for religion's effect specifically on prosocial behavior (Analyses 4 5) and test whether religious priming effects generalize to individuals who report little or no religiosity (Analyses 6 7) Results across 93 studies and 11,653 participants show that religious priming has robust effects across a variety of outcome measures prosocial measures included. Religious priming does not, however, reliably affect non religious participants suggesting that priming depends on the cognitive activation of culturally transmitted religious beliefs.
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