Compensatory Control and Belief in God: A Registered Replication Report Across Two Countries

Abstract

Compensatory Control Theory (CCT) suggests that religious belief systems provide an external source of control that can substitute a perceived lack of personal control. In a seminal paper, Kay et al. (2008) experimentally demonstrated that a threat to personal control increases endorsement of the existence of a controlling God. In the current registered report, we conducted a high-powered (N = 829) direct replication of this effect, using samples from the Netherlands and the United States. Our results show moderate to strong evidence for the absence of an experimental effect across both countries: belief in a controlling God did not increase after a threat compared to an affirmation of personal control. In a complementary preregistered analysis, an inverse relation between general feelings of personal control and belief in a controlling God was found in the US, but not in the Netherlands. We discuss potential reasons for the replication failure of the experimental effect and cultural mechanisms explaining the cross-country difference in the correlational effect. Together, our findings suggest that experimental manipulations of control may be ineffective in shifting belief in God, but that individual differences in the experience of control may be related to religious beliefs in a way that is consistent with CCT.

Tight cultures and vengeful gods: How culture shapes religious belief.

“…Second, our measure of punitive religious beliefs asked about the "importance" of different traits in God rather than about people's "belief" in these traits. We selected a measure of importance because it is sometimes difficult to manipulate religious belief in an experimental context (Hoogeveen et al, 2019). Nevertheless, people may have endorsed the importance of different traits in our study without necessarily believing them.…”

Structure-seeking as a psychological antecedent of beliefs about morality.

“…We experimentally manipulated structure-seeking using a procedure adapted from Kay and colleagues (2008) that has been shown to reduce feelings of personal control without increasing negative mood or decreasing self-esteem (Cutright, Bettman, & Fitzsimons, 2013; Kay et al, 2008). Similar experimental manipulations have been widely used in the literature to increase structure-seeking tendencies (e.g., Cutright et al, 2013; Friesen, Kay, Eibach, & Galinsky, 2014; Kay et al, 2008; Landau et al, 2015; Ma & Kay, 2017; Rutjens et al, 2010; although, see Hoogeveen, Wagenmakers, Kay, & van Elk, 2020). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions.…”

Demystifying Source Credibility (SC) in Social Sciences: An Inescapable Construct towards Effective Communications

“…The credibility of the source can greatly enhance the persuasiveness and conviction of religious leaders when communicating with their members. Religious discourse often relies on persuasion as a key tool to convince the audience of the truth of the doctrine being presented (Adam, 2017;Hoogeveen & van Elk, 2019). While persuasion can be found in many types of writing, it is particularly important in religious communication (Yusof, 2016).…”