Religious Priming: A Meta-Analysis With a Focus on Prosociality
📄 Original study ↗Plain English Summary
Can flashing someone a religious word or image nudge them to behave more generously? This massive review crunched 93 studies involving over 11,000 people to find out. The overall effect was moderate -- religious priming (briefly exposing people to religious concepts) did shift behavior, with an effect size of 0.40. But once the researchers corrected for publication bias (the tendency for only exciting results to get published), the effect shrank to 0.29. Prosocial effects specifically -- like sharing or cooperating -- were even smaller but still real. The most fascinating finding: these priming effects only worked on religious people. Non-believers showed essentially zero response, suggesting the trick depends on activating beliefs someone already holds rather than tapping into some universal human reflex. The study is a methodological showcase, using sophisticated bias-detection tools like p-curve analysis -- the same tools now hotly debated in parapsychology research.
Research Notes
Methodological exemplar for meta-analytic evaluation: demonstrates p-curve analysis, trim-and-fill publication-bias correction, and moderator testing. Directly relevant to meta-debate controversy (#10) where identical tools are applied to psi literatures. The finding that priming effects vanish for non-believers parallels experimenter-effect debates in parapsychology.
Seven meta-analyses evaluated the robustness of religious priming effects across 93 studies (N = 11,653). Using effect-size analyses, p-curve analyses, and trim-and-fill publication-bias corrections, the review examined whether religious priming reliably alters psychological outcomes, promotes prosocial behavior, and extends to non-believers. Overall priming produced g = 0.40 (p < .0001), reduced to g = 0.29 after bias correction. Prosocial effects were smaller (g = 0.27, adjusted g = 0.18) but robust. P-curve analyses confirmed evidentiary value over p-hacking. Effects were confined to religious participants (g = 0.44) with no reliable effect on non-believers (g = 0.04, p = .71), suggesting priming depends on activation of culturally transmitted beliefs rather than universal low-level associations.
Links
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Companion
- Intercessory Prayer for the Alleviation of Ill Health — Roberts, Leanne (2009)
- The "File Drawer Problem" and Tolerance for Null Results — Rosenthal, Robert (1979)
- Testing for Questionable Research Practices in a Meta-Analysis: An Example from Experimental Parapsychology — Bierman, Dick J (2016)
- Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science — Open Science Collaboration (2015)
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📋 Cite this paper
Shariff, Azim F, Willard, Aiyana K, Andersen, Teresa, Norenzayan, Ara (2015). Religious Priming: A Meta-Analysis With a Focus on Prosociality. Personality and Social Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868314568811
@article{shariff_2015_religious_priming_meta_analysis,
title = {Religious Priming: A Meta-Analysis With a Focus on Prosociality},
author = {Shariff, Azim F and Willard, Aiyana K and Andersen, Teresa and Norenzayan, Ara},
year = {2015},
journal = {Personality and Social Psychology Review},
doi = {10.1177/1088868314568811},
}