Matching Items (2)
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- All Subjects: Religiousness
- Creators: Cohen, Adam B.
Description
Numerous published studies and a meta-analysis suggest that priming religion causes an increase in prosocial behaviors. However, mediating mechanisms of this purported causal relationship have not yet been formally tested. In line with cultural evolutionary theories and their supporting evidence, I test the proposition that public self-awareness mediates the effect of priming religion on prosociality. However, other theories of religion suggest that persons may feel small when perceiving God, and these feelings have predicted prosociality in published research. In line with this, I also test whether a sense of small self and, relatedly, self-transcendent connection, are possible mediators of the religion priming effect on prosociality. In this study, I implicitly prime religion and test whether the above constructs mediate a potential effect on prosocial intentions. Although self-transcendent connection predicted prosocial intentions, the implicit prime affected neither the mediating variables nor prosocial intentions, nor were any significant indirect effects evident. Thus, no causal evidence of mediation was found. In addition, I examined whether God representations moderate the path from implicit religion priming to each proposed mediator. The results suggest that a benevolent God representation moderates the effect of religion priming on self-transcendent connection and that an ineffable God representation moderates the effect of religion priming on sense of small self. Lastly, I tested for mediation with a cross-sectional path model containing religiosity and belief in God as predictors. The results suggest that religiosity, controlling for belief in God, predicts prosociality through self-transcendent connection but belief in God, controlling for religiosity, does not predict prosociality. Implications for the religion priming literature and, more generally, the psychology of religion, are discussed.
ContributorsScott, Matthew J (Author) / Cohen, Adam B. (Thesis advisor) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Johnson, Kathryn A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Research and theory in social psychology and related fields indicates that people simultaneously hold many cultural identities. And it is well evidenced across relevant fields (e.g., sociology, marketing, economics) that salient identities are instrumental in a variety of cognitive and behavioral processes, including decision-making. It is not, however, well understood how the relative salience of various cultural identities factors into the process of making identity-relevant choices, particularly ones that require an actor to choose between conflicting sets of cultural values or beliefs. It is also unclear whether the source of that salience (e.g., chronic or situational) is meaningful in this regard. The current research makes novel predictions concerning the roles of cultural identity centrality and cultural identity situational salience in three distinct aspects of the decision-making process: Direction of decision, speed of decision, and emotion related to decision. In doing so, the research highlights two under-researched forms of culture (i.e., political and religious) and uses as the focal dependent variable a decision-making scenario that forces participants to choose between the values of their religious and political cultures and, to some degree, behave in an identity-inconsistent manner. Results indicate main effects of Christian identity centrality and democrat identity centrality on preference for traditional versus gender-neutral (i.e., non-traditional/progressive) restrooms after statistically controlling for covariates. Additionally, results show a significant main effect of democrat identity centrality and a significant interaction effect of Christian and democrat identity centrality on positive emotion linked to the decision. Post hoc analyses further reveal a significant quadratic relationship between Christian identity centrality and emotion related to the decision. There was no effect of situational strength of democrat identity salience on the decision. Neither centrality or situational strength had any effect on the speed with which participants made their decisions. This research theoretically and empirically advances the study of cultural psychology and carries important implications for identity research and judgment and decision-making across a variety of fields, including management, behavioral economics, and marketing.
ContributorsBarbour, Joseph Eugene (Author) / Cohen, Adam B. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Mackinnon, David P (Committee member) / Mandel, Naomi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019