Priming from the pulpit: Extending regulatory focus theory to church services

Abstract

The purpose of this research note is to extend a powerful cognitive psychology theory-regulatory focus theoryto a specific nonprofit organization: churches. We apply this theory to the design of church services to model how church leaders can structure services to enhance congregant experience and generate positive behavioral outcomes. We present an experiment utilizing 126 adult Americans as initial evidence for our framework. The results indicate that using appropriate regulatory focus priming strategies can increase congregant donations.

A processing fluency perspective on overhead aversion: How much is too much?

“…Other research highlights that the more fluently perceivers can process a given stimulus, the more positive their response (e.g., Forster et al, 2013; Reber et al, 2004; Song & Schwarz, 2008). For instance, a demonstrative effect of fluency is exhibiting a preference for an option just because it “feels right” (e.g., Johnson et al, 2019; A. Y. Lee & Aaker, 2004; Williams et al, 2020). To demonstrate, Thibodeau and Durgin (2011), found that fluency explained why metaphors that demonstrate a high level of conventionality (phrases that include familiar terms that are easy to connect/process; i.e., “memory is a warehouse”) just feel right and are deemed as more suitable than metaphors that have low conventionality (terms that have less familiar associations and require more cognitive resources to process; i.e., “a fisherman is like a spider”).…”

“…For instance, a demonstrative effect of fluency is exhibiting a preference for an option just because it "feels right" (e.g., Johnson et al, 2019;A. Y. Lee & Aaker, 2004;Williams et al, 2020).…”