Divine intervention
Amber DeBono et al.
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Religious people differ in how punishing or forgiving they see their Gods. Such different beliefs may have distinct consequences in encouraging people to act in normative ways. Though a number of priming studies have shown a positive causal relationship between religion and normative behavior, few have primed different aspects of religion, and none has examined the punishing/forgiving dimension. In 3 experiments, Christians instructed to read and write about a forgiving God stole more money (Experiments 1 and 2) and cheated more on a math assignment (Experiment 3) than those who read and wrote about a punishing God, a forgiving human, a punishing human, or those in a control condition. These studies present a more complex and nuanced picture of the important relationship between religion and normative behavior.
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Belief in miracles and attitudes towards voluntary euthanasia
Shane Sharp
Death Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Results of logistic regression analysis of data from the General Social Survey (N = 1,799) finds that those who have a strong belief in miracles are more likely to say that a person with an incurable illness should not be allowed to accept medical treatments that painlessly hasten death than those who have a less strong belief in miracles or do not believe in miracles, net of respondents’ religious affiliations, frequency of religious attendance, views of the Bible, and other sociodemographic controls. Results highlight the need to consider specific religious beliefs when predicting individuals’ attitudes towards voluntary euthanasia.
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Yasuko Kanamori et al.
Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study provides the 1st descriptive survey study to date that reports attitudes and beliefs toward transgender persons with a sample of the U.S. evangelical Christian population. Data were collected from 483 participants (nonreligious n = 253, evangelical Christian n = 230) recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The study employed the Transgender Attitudes and Beliefs Scale — a psychometrically sound and culturally sensitive, 3-factor (interpersonal comfort, sex/gender beliefs, and human value) 29-item scale — to assess attitudes and beliefs toward transgender. Data were analyzed using two-way analyses of variance, item analyses, independent samples t tests, and Pearson’s correlations. Findings indicated that evangelical Christians showed significantly lower attitude scores and a more dichotomous or fixed view of gender compared to their nonreligious counterparts. At the same time, evangelical Christians displayed greater variability in their attitudes toward transgender persons and had high ratings on the human value factor overall (measuring the extent to which a person affirms transgender persons’ intrinsic value as a person), which was, in turn, less correlated with the other factors — interpersonal comfort and sex/gender beliefs — than for their secular reference group. On questions pertaining to civil rights, evangelical Christians, on average, gave significantly lower ratings than did nonreligious persons, though the effect size was small on the issue of access to housing.
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Longitudinal Effects of Religious Media on Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage
Samuel Perry & Kara Snawder
Sexuality & Culture, December 2016, Pages 785–804
Abstract:
Religion and anti-gay prejudice in the United States are closely connected. Yet we still know little about the specific mechanisms through which religious subcultures may shape adherents’ attitudes toward gays and lesbians. This study considers religious media consumption as a unique mechanism through which religious Americans are socialized and embedded within an anti-gay religious subculture. Drawing on panel data from the nationally-representative Portraits of American Life Study, and focusing on opposition to same-sex marriage as a measure of anti-gay prejudice, analyses show that more frequent consumption of religious radio and TV (but not internet) is associated with higher levels of opposition to same-sex marriage over time. These effects remain significant with different model specifications as well as controls for previous attitudes toward same-sex marriage, general media use, sociodemographic and religious characteristics, and intimate contact with gays and lesbians. We propose that consuming religious media over time may influence Americans’ views toward LGBT issues directly through explicit messages about homosexuality and indirectly by embedding Americans within a broader religious subculture (largely, conservative Protestantism) that opposes homosexuality.
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Censor Morum? The 17th Amendment, Religious Diversity, and Ideological Extremism in the Senate
Jacob Neiheisel & Paul Djupe
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Madisonian formulation suggests that (religious) pluralism is linked to moderate representation when filtered through republican selection. We leverage the quasi-experiment afforded by the ratification of the 17th Amendment to explore whether religious diversity shapes how senators vote. The shift from indirect to direct elections, coupled with roll-call and religious Census data, allows us to test hypotheses derived from differing conceptions of pluralism and the literature on constituency effects in Congress. We find that religious diversity is linked to ideological moderation, but that link weakens considerably in the immediate aftermath of the amendment’s passage.
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Religiosity and income: A panel cointegration and causality analysis
Dierk Herzer & Holger Strulik
Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1930 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test for the direction of causality. We show that there exists a negative long-run relationship between the level of religiosity, measured by church attendance, and the level of income, measured by the log of GDP per capita. The result is robust to alternative estimation methods, potential outliers, different samples, different measures of church attendance and alternative specifications of the income variable. Long-run causality runs in both directions, higher income leads to declining religiosity and declining religiosity leads to higher income.
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Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God
Michael Barlev, Spencer Mermelstein & Tamsin German
Cognitive Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., “God has beliefs that are true”] or false according to both [e.g., “All beliefs God has are false”]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., “God has beliefs that are false”] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., “All beliefs God has are true”]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God — a supernatural religious entity — but not for a natural religious entity (a priest).
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Religion and mergers and acquisitions contracting: The case of earnout agreements
Ahmed Elnahas, Kabir Hassan & Ghada Ismail
Journal of Corporate Finance, February 2017, Pages 221–246
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the growing literature on the effect of religion on corporate decision making. We posit that contingent payment in mergers and acquisitions not only violates Islamic law but also results in several agency issues by creating an incentive for managers to participate in long-term value-destroying behavior during earnout periods. Our empirical results, using regression as well as difference-in-difference estimation, show that target managers significantly manage earnings upward by cutting discretionary expenses during earnout periods. As compared to a sample of matched non-earnout M&A, acquisitions with earnout clauses are followed by significantly lower long-term abnormal returns. Our arguments and results have significant economic and legal consequences on cross-border M&A and could be used to facilitate worldwide economic integration.
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Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons
Michael Ferguson et al.
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
High-level cognitive and emotional experience arises from brain activity, but the specific brain substrates for religious and spiritual euphoria remain unclear. We demonstrate using functional magnetic resonance imaging scans in 19 devout Mormons that a recognizable feeling central to their devotional practice was reproducibly associated with activation in nucleus accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and frontal attentional regions. Nucleus accumbens activation preceded peak spiritual feelings by 1–3 s and was replicated in four separate tasks. Attentional activation in the anterior cingulate and frontal eye fields was greater in the right hemisphere. The association of abstract ideas and brain reward circuitry may interact with frontal attentional and emotive salience processing, suggesting a mechanism whereby doctrinal concepts may come to be intrinsically rewarding and motivate behavior in religious individuals.
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Effects of oxytocin administration on spirituality and emotional responses to meditation
Patty Van Cappellen et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, October 2016, Pages 1579-1587
Abstract:
The oxytocin (OT) system, critically involved in social bonding, may also impinge on spirituality, which is the belief in a meaningful life imbued with a sense of connection to a Higher Power and/or the world. Midlife male participants (N = 83) were randomly assigned to receive intranasal OT or placebo. In exploratory analyses, participants were also genotyped for polymorphisms in two genes critical for OT signaling, the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR rs53576) and CD38 (rs6449182 and rs3796863). Results showed that intranasal OT increased self-reported spirituality on two separate measures and this effect remained significant a week later. It also boosted participants’ experience of specific positive emotions during meditation, at both explicit and implicit levels. Furthermore, the effect of OT on spirituality was moderated by OT-related genotypes. These results provide the first experimental evidence that spirituality, endorsed by millions worldwide, appears to be supported by OT.