With God on our side: Religious primes reduce the envisioned physical formidability of a menacing adversary

Abstract

The imagined support of benevolent supernatural agents attenuates anxiety and risk perception. Here, we extend these findings to judgments of the threat posed by a potentially violent adversary. Conceptual representations of bodily size and strength summarize factors that determine the relative threat posed by foes. The proximity of allies moderates the envisioned physical formidability of adversaries, suggesting that cues of access to supernatural allies will reduce the envisioned physical formidability of a threatening target. Across two studies, subtle cues of both supernatural and earthly social support reduced the envisioned physical formidability of a violent criminal. These manipulations had no effect on the perceived likelihood of encountering non-conflictual physical danger, raising the possibility that imagined supernatural support leads participants to view themselves not as shielded from encountering perilous situations, but as protected should perils arise.

May God Guide Our Guns

“…Participants in the supernatural support condition also retrospectively assessed their personal performance in the battle as superior to that of their opponents. On the one hand, this result agrees with prior findings that cues of supernatural support can heighten confidence in one’s personal chances of victory (Holbrook et al 2016a ). On the other hand, the effect of the supernatural manipulation on personal confidence was accounted for by concomitant elevation in coalitional confidence, suggesting that perceptions of having personally performed better in the battle were driven by participants’ perceptions that they had done so only insofar as they were embedded in a supernaturally supported team, an interpretation that is reinforced by the finding that participants did not assess their personal performance as significantly superior to that of their teammates.…”

“…Overall, these results align with anecdotal real-world observations of a relationship between religiosity and willingness to engage in violent conflict. The present findings regarding coalitional battle confidence likewise extend the emerging body of work relating religious cognition with aggression (e.g., Atran and Ginges 2012 ; Kruglanski et al 2009 ; McKay et al 2011 ) and with optimistic perceptions of formidability relative to one’s adversaries (Holbrook et al 2016a ; Sosis et al 2012 ).…”

“…Although some aggressive acts associated with religiosity may be motivated by factors such as moral convictions or societal norms orthogonal to supernatural cognition per se, convergent lines of evidence indicate that perceiving supernatural agents as sources of aid can inspire aggressive responses to conflict by bolstering confidence that one’s group will triumph, much as one would expect of a group with access to powerful natural allies. For example, participants experimentally cued with reminders of either actual or supernatural allies envision a threatening male adversary as being less physically formidable than do controls (Holbrook et al 2016a ), and subliminal primes of religious concepts increase levels of costly punishment in economic games in a manner reminiscent of retributive aggression (McKay et al 2011 ). Similarly suggestive that belief in supernatural allies attenuates fear of violent conflict, studies of trait religiosity reveal that faith in supportive supernatural agents negatively correlates both with the fear of death (Jong et al 2013 ) and with reactivity to reminders of death (Jonas and Fischer 2006 ).…”

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex to Experimentally Reduce Ideological Threat Responses

“…In the present design, all participants were reminded of death to establish a context in which participants might be expected to draw on positive religious beliefs as an ideological solution. Although the findings were consistent with this interpretation, as well as with prior work linking religiosity with confidence in the face of physical danger 65 66 67 68 , exposing all participants to a death prime constitutes a serious limitation, as the data cannot reveal whether downregulation of the pMFC would produce comparable effects at baseline, in the absence of a recent threat cue. Further, it is not possible to determine whether the reduction in out-group bias toward the critical immigrant observed following cTBS of the pMFC reflects a muting in the impact of the death prime, a muting in the impact of the ideological conflict posed by the criticism of the US, or an interaction between the two.…”

In the presence of god : does acceptance by god increase prosocial behavior?

“…And when other people are the source of danger and uncertainty, thinking about God might similarly lead to more risk-taking in the form of greater willingness to interact with others. Indeed, exposing participants to words about God led them to perceive a potential adversary as being less physically threatening (Holbrook, Fessler, & Pollack, 2016), showing that thinking about God can attenuate the risk associated with interpersonal interactions, perhaps with the assurance that God will punish anyone who would cheat or harm the individual.…”