Measuring supernatural belief implicitly using the Affect Misattribution Procedure

Abstract

Asking about religious beliefs, or lack thereof, is a sensitive and complex issue. Due to cultural norms, people may be motivated to respond in a socially desirable way. In addition, deliberating about beliefs may yield different responses than intuition-based responses. To develop a better understanding of the relationship between intuition and self-reported belief, we developed a new implicit measure of supernatural belief. Specifically, we adapted the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) to measure supernatural belief. In a preregistered online study of 404 American participants, we found that the strength of associations between supernatural entities (e.g., god, devil, heaven) and the concept "real" (as opposed to the concept "imaginary") predicted self-reported supernatural belief and self-reported religious behavior, and these associations were of comparable magnitude to those found in studies where supernatural belief was measured implicitly using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). These results provide provisional evidence that the AMP can be used as an implicit measure of supernatural belief.

'Feeling' or 'sensing' the future? Testing for anomalous cognitions in clinical versus healthy populations

“…Motivated cognitions are categories, beliefs, or meanings that influence and bias the performance of different types of reasoning ( Mather and Carstensen, 2005 ; Sood, 2013 ). For example, people who believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena (as an example of magical ideation) would execute analytical and intuitive reasoning influenced by these acquired beliefs ( Rogers et al., 2019 ; Ross et al., 2019 ). Therefore, following Irwin's (2009) review between intuitive style and motivated cognition, it is still to be to understood which of the two variables constitutes the antecedent (cause) and the consequence (effects) in the context of anomalous perceptions.…”

Handbook of Positive Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality

“…Religious beliefs and self-concepts can also be measured implicitly (LaBouff et al, 2010). Measures such as the Implicit Association Test (Shariff et al, 2008) and the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Ross et al, 2019) have been utilized to assess the strength of people's associations between supernatural words and concepts of true/false and real/imaginary.…”