Priming communal attendance raises approval of violence while priming prayer lowers it

Evidence

Instead of measuring prayer and attendance frequencies, we introduced a cognitive priming procedure to get closer at causality: for half of our sample, we asked them to think about prayer to God; for the other half, we asked them to think about synagogue attendance. Then everyone was asked about Goldstein’s act. We found that reminders of synagogue attendance increased the odds of approving Goldstein’s violent act. Reminders of prayer, if anything, decreased these odds. Once again, we find that some aspects of religion are implicated in violent conflict, others aren’t, or may even work to soften conflict. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 536

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would reminders of private prayer actually decrease approval of violence? Is this because private pray-ers view the act as unsanctioned by God, or because prayer primes a one-on-one vertical relationship incompatible with outgroup hostility? Worth chasing the original study for interpretation.
• XREF: The prayer-versus-attendance asymmetry aligns with Norenzayan’s claim that big God beliefs work through communal watches (public) more than private devotion—connecting to White Noise’s ironic handling of ritual and to the reader’s fumi-e analysis (public trampling disrupts the communal node).