The effects of implicit religious primes on dictator game allocations: A preregistered replication experiment.

Abstract

Shariff and Norenzayan (2007) discovered that people allocate more money to anonymous strangers in a dictator game following a scrambled sentence task that involved words with religious meanings. We conducted a direct replication of key elements of Shariff and Norenzayan's (2007) Experiment 2, with some additional changes. Specifically, we (a) collected data from a much larger sample of participants (N = 650); (b) added a second religious priming condition that attempted to prime thoughts of religion less conspicuously; (c) modified the wording of some of their task explanations to avoid deceiving our participants; (d) added a more explicit awareness probe; (e) reduced prime-probe time; and (f) performed statistical analyses that are more appropriate for non-normal data. We did not find a statistically significant effect for religious priming. Additional tests for possible between-subjects moderators of the religious priming effect also yielded nonsignificant results. A small-scale meta-analysis, which included all known studies investigating the effect of religious priming on dictator game offers, suggested that the mean effect size is not different from zero, although the wide confidence intervals indicate that conclusions regarding this effect should be drawn with caution. Finally, we found some evidence of small-study effects: Studies with larger samples tended to produce smaller effects (a pattern consistent with publication bias). Overall, these results suggest that the effects of religious priming on dictator game allocations might be either not reliable or else quite sensitive to differences in methods or in the populations in which the effect has been examined.

The elusive nature of the blocking effect: 15 failures to replicate.

“…Rather than attempting to address this issue as a yes-or-no question, other researchers have started to focus on the conditions under which a social priming effect can be observed and the mechanisms that mediate its occurrence (e.g. Bargh, 2006;Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012;Gomes & McCullough, 2015;Sharrif & Norenzayan, 2015), an avenue, we argue, that would be fruitful for the blocking effect as well.…”

Supernatural and secular monitors promote human cooperation only if they remind of punishment

“…In fact, two recent studies (Aveyard, 2014;Gomes & McCullough, 2015) could not replicate the prosocial effects of religious priming with the materials used by Shariff and Norenzayan (2007). Our results suggest that one possible reason for this failure of replication is that the original study included both punishing (God and possibly prophet) and nonpunishing (spirit, sacred and divine) religious primes.…”

Social learning and the demise of costly cooperation in humans

“…Cultural evolution provides a potential explanation, because if cooperative behaviours are learned socially from others (social learning), then cooperation can spread within groups, and cooperative groups can outcompete relatively uncooperative groups [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]16]. The extent to which cultural evolution favours higher levels of cooperation is controversial [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. First, theory suggests that the outcome of cultural evolution depends critically upon the mechanisms by which individuals obtain and use social information.…”