Prayer frequency reduces scapegoating once religious exclusivity is held constant.

Evidence

Hansen and I found that, after matching people on age, gender, occupational status, and other factors, exclusivity increased the odds of scapegoating. No surprise there—more dogmatic people are more scapegoating of other religions. But what was more interesting, holding constant exclusivity, was that prayer frequency reduced the odds of scapegoating. This means that people who pray a lot, but do not think that they have a monopoly on the truth, are in fact less scapegoating than those who are less devoted and are equally nondogmatic. We found this in the overall sample, and we found the same patterns within each religious group we considered, even among Buddhists. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 521

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s analytical integration: this de-bundles religion into components (devotion vs. exclusivity) much as Baumard et al. and the fumi-e analysis require separating religious dimensions. Also echoes the Big God mechanism: devotional (non-exclusivist) religion reducing out-group hostility.
• QUESTION: This finding rests on self-reported prayer frequency correlated with scapegoating, not a demonstrated causal mechanism. Worth chasing whether the effect holds cross-culturally absent Judeo-Christian framing.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Why devout but non-dogmatic believers are less prejudiced than the merely nondogmatic’ — parsing Allport’s ‘makes and unmakes prejudice’ with a data split on exclusivity.

Related

• Frequent prayer reduces scapegoating once dogmatic exclusivity is controlled (similarity 0.93)
• Prayer frequency and belief exclusivity are separable dimensions of religiosity (similarity 0.84)
• Religious devotion’s link to scapegoating depends on disentangling companion traits (similarity 0.80)