1,721,017 research outputs found
Considering the role of self-interest in moral disciplining
No full textWhy do people moralize harmless behaviors? Although people rely on cooperative principles in making their moral judgments, I argue that self-interest likely plays a role even in these judgments. I suggest potential lines of research that might examine the role of self-interest in puritanical morality
Religion as a natural laboratory for understanding human behavior
No full textWhat do we gain from the scientific study of religion? One possibility is that religious contexts are unique, and cognition within these contexts is worth understanding. Another possibility is that religion can be viewed as a laboratory for understanding psychology and culture more broadly. Rather than limiting the study of religion to a single context, I argue that the study of religion is useful precisely because it illuminates secular psychological and cultural processes. I first outline my practical approach to psychology and religion, focusing on how people use religion to advance mundane goals. I then discuss several domains in which studying religion has led to important insights, including culture, prejudice, and cognition. This article is an extended version of an Early Career Award address given at the International Association for the Psychology of Religion meeting in 2023 in Groningen, Netherlands
Google search data for psychological scientists: a tutorial and best practices
No full textGoogle searches have been described as the most important dataset on the human psyche ever assembled. Google search data—accessible through a tool called Google Trends—can provide new insights on topics as varied as stereotypes and prejudices, political attitudes, religious identity and belief, personality, motivations, psychological well-being, mental health, and culture. Google Trends can generate highly customized datasets: Users can compare the popularity of search terms across most of the world, or access longitudinal data as far back as 2004, and they can do so with high geographical and temporal granularity. Notwithstanding these opportunities, Google Trends has significant limitations. Without appropriate caution, users can easily rely on data that are not meaningful or draw mistaken conclusions. We provide a comprehensive overview and tutorial, covering (a) opportunities of Google Trends for psychological scientists; (b) how Google Trends scores are calculated, how reliable they are, and why some queries might yield low-quality data; (c) instructions with accompanying R code for creating custom datasets beyond what Google Trends provides by default; (d) example analyses for studies that could be done using Google Trends data; (e) an overview of common pitfalls; and (f) recommendations for safeguarding data quality and their interpretation
Pro-life policy preferences partly reflect desires to suppress casual sexual behavior, not solely sanctity of life concerns
No full textPro-life individuals often emphasize sanctity-of-life concerns as driving their opposition to abortion. This implies the straightforward prediction that the more strongly people oppose abortion for such reasons (e.g., “abortion is murder”), the more they will endorse policies preventing abortions (face-value account). An alternative suggests that typically nonconscious reproductive goals (e.g., discouraging casual sex) influence policy preferences; this strategic account predicts a different pattern of policy endorsement: all else equal, abortion opponents will prioritize abortion-preventing policies discouraging casual sex. A pilot study and two preregistered U.S. experiments (N = 1,960) provide relatively greater support for the strategic account: the strongest abortion opponents more strongly endorse policies that prevent abortions by discouraging casual sex (e.g., abortion bans, abstinence-only sex education) over policies that do not (comprehensive sex education)—even controlling for conservatism and religiosity. Commonly voiced arguments against abortion may be more rhetorically effective but less reflective of genuine drivers underlying arguers’ beliefs.</p
Psychology: Atheism and moral intuitions
No full textHow robust is the perceived association between immorality and atheism? Studies across 13 countries demonstrate that immoral behaviour is intuitively associated with atheism: people routinely assume that an immoral person is likely to be an atheist, and this effect is consistent across a wide range of societies, though with notable variation
Is there anything good about atheists? Exploring positive and negative stereotypes of the religious and nonreligious
No full textNegative stereotypes about atheists are widespread, robust, rooted in distrust, and linked to discrimination. Here, we examine whether social perceivers in the United States might additionally hold any positive stereotypes about atheists (and corresponding negative stereotypes of the religious). Experiments 1 (N = 401) and 2 (N = 398, preregistered) used methods of intuitive stereotypes (the conjunction fallacy). People tended to stereotype atheists as fun, open-minded, and scientific—even as they harbor extreme intuitive anti-atheist prejudice in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 (N = 382) used a quasi-behavioral partner-choice paradigm, finding that most people choose atheist (vs. religious) partners in stereotype-relevant domains. Overall, results suggest that people simultaneously possess negative and also positive stereotypes about atheists, but that corresponding negative stereotypes of the religious may be even stronger. These effects are robust among the nonreligious and somewhat religious, but evidence is mixed about whether the highly religious harbor these positive stereotypes
Opposition to short-term mating predicts anti-atheist prejudice
No full textWhich people are most likely to harbor prejudice toward atheists? Recent research suggests that perceptions of (non)religious individuals tend to track lifestyle (i.e., family and sexual) choices. We draw on this work, proposing that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from the conflict that arises among competing mating strategies. Across four studies (N = 1855), we confirmed that anti-atheist prejudice is related to stereotypes about atheists' mating strategies (Pilot Study); we further found that people who favor committed mating strategies express greater levels of anti-atheist prejudice, even controlling for their beliefs about cooperation (Study 1a) and religiosity (Study 1b). Finally, this effect holds even when using a semi-implicit measure of prejudice, again controlling for religiosity (Study 2). These results suggest that mating strategies provide one source of individual differences in prejudice toward atheists, consistent with the notion that this prejudice may reflect perceived differences in lifestyle rather than just abstract theological disagreements or ingroup bias
Religious people are trusted because they are viewed as slow life-history strategists
No full textReligious people are more trusted than nonreligious people. Although most theorists attribute these perceptions to the beliefs of religious targets, religious individuals also differ in behavioral ways that might cue trust. We examined whether perceivers might trust religious targets more because they heuristically associate religion with slow life-history strategies. In three experiments, we found that religious targets are viewed as slow life-history strategists and that these findings are not the result of a universally positive halo effect; that the effect of target religion on trust is significantly mediated by the target’s life-history traits (i.e., perceived reproductive strategy); and that when perceivers have direct information about a target’s reproductive strategy, their ratings of trust are driven primarily by his or her reproductive strategy, rather than religion. These effects operate over and above targets’ belief in moralizing gods and offer a novel theoretical perspective on religion and trust
- …
