Replicating and extending the effects of auditory religious cues on dishonest behavior

Abstract

Although scientists agree that replications are critical to the debate on the validity of religious priming research, religious priming replications are scarce. This paper attempts to replicate and extend previously observed effects of religious priming on ethical behavior. We test the effect of religious instrumental music on individuals' ethical behavior with university participants (N = 408) in the Czech Republic, Japan, and the US. Participants were randomly assigned to listen to one of three musical tracks (religious, secular, or white noise) or to no music (control) for the duration of a decision-making game. Participants were asked to indicate which side of a vertically-bisected computer screen contained more dots and, in every trial, indicating that the right side of the screen had more dots earned participants the most money (irrespective of the number of dots). Therefore, participants were able to report dishonestly to earn more money. In agreement with previous research, we did not observe any main effects of condition. However, we were unable to replicate a moderating effect of selfreported religiosity on the effects of religious music on ethical behavior. Nevertheless, further analyses revealed moderating effects for ritual participation and declared religious affiliation congruent with the musical prime. That is, participants affiliated with a religious organization and taking part in rituals cheated significantly less than their peers when listening to religious music. We also observed significant differences in cheating behavior across samples. On average, US participants cheated the most and Czech participants cheated the least. We conclude that normative conduct is, in part, learned through active membership in religious communities and our findings provide further support for religious music as a subtle, moral cue.

Cognitive control and dishonesty

“…Second, shaping the context to increase self-referential thinking may also help increase honesty. For example, increasing the salience of the moral self by subconscious priming [82], listening to religious music [83], or observing (religious) rituals [84] appears to significantly reduce dishonesty. Moreover, increasing one's focus on the self through mindfulness may increase honesty as well [85].…”

Advertising cooperative phenotype through costly signals facilitates collective action

“…Participants were recruited from a student participant pool at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Expectedly, sampling from this pool in our previous studies [ 46 , 47 ] revealed a young (mean age = 24) and secular sample where the modal answer on religiosity was ‘not religious’, and the modal answer on ritual participation was ‘never/not often’. Hence, testing our hypotheses on a population largely unengaged with costly religious signals should present a strong test of our hypothesis.…”

“…However, while these studies provide valuable support for CSTR by harnessing existing religious practices in various cultures, they usually cannot separate costly signals of commitment from other tangled factors and motivations underlying participation in these rituals such as personal vows to superhuman agents, anxiety management [42][43][44], or health improvement [27,45]. Nor can these studies disentangle the complex causal chains of religious systems that may affect cooperation [46,47]. Thus, it is not clear whether participation in religious practices is the primary driver of cooperative behaviour or whether it is the signalled cooperative phenotype driving the cooperative outputs.…”

Outgroup threat and the emergence of cohesive groups: A cross-cultural examination

“…Furthermore, whereas using the same priming materials across different field-sites confers multiple advantages (cf. Lang et al, 2016; Nichols et al, 2020), their strength and effectiveness might have been too low at sites that have never experienced a terrorist attack. Combining locally salient materials that would be comparable across sites should overcome these issues, although finding such materials would be extremely challenging.…”