Religious primes vary in depth of awareness and mechanism of effect

Evidence

Like Shariff et al. (2016), we divided the primes that researchers used into four categories: explicit, implicit, contextual, and subliminal. Explicit primes (e.g., “Think about God”) expose participants to religious content, facilitating conscious processing of the primes. Implicit primes also expose participants to religious content, but the purpose of the primes is disguised. Participants do not realize that a goal of the researcher is to increase the salience of religion. For example, a common implicit prime is a task in which participants form sentences from scrambled words (Srull & Wyer, 1979). In a religious priming condition, some of the words are related to religion (e.g., Haggard et al., 2019). Thus, although participants see the prime directly, they are not aware of the relevance of the prime because they believe they are simply performing a word task. … Contextual primes mean that participants perform experimental tasks (e.g., completing measures of prejudice) in a religious location, such as a church. Subliminal primes are below awareness, such as when a religious word or symbol is flashed on a screen for such a short amount of time that the participant is not aware of seeing it (e.g., a Lexical Decision Task [LDT]; see Johnson et al., 2010). Researchers have speculated about the effects of different types of primes. For example, Razpurker-Apfeld and Shamoa-Nir (2015) suggested that primes operating below awareness might fail to generate the group identity that serves as the link to intergroup bias. Alternatively, participants may respond to primes that are above awareness by seeking to alter reactions they deem to be undesirable (Fazio & Olson, 2014). It thus remains an open question which primes will have a greater impact on intergroup prejudice. — Annetta Snell and Miron Zuckerman and Bonnie M. Le, Does Religious Priming Induce Greater…, 24

Categorization

• DEFINE: A clean taxonomy distinguishing four religious-priming types by awareness and disguise.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether subliminal vs. supraliminal priming differences parallel the religious/nonreligious prejudice gap being studied.
• XREF: connects to: Religious priming produces real but small and sometimes unreliable effects — Annetta Snell and Miron Zuckerman and Bonnie M. Le, Does Religious Priming Induce Greater…, 95; Religious primes influence even nonreligious people through mere cultural knowledge — Annetta Snell and Miron Zuckerman and Bonnie M. Le, Does Religious Priming Induce Greater…, 94; Nonconscious religious primes reliably affect believers but only inconsistently affect atheists. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 179 (+2 more)

Related

• Religious priming produces real but small and sometimes unreliable effects (similarity 0.88)
• Type of religious prime may not moderate prejudice outcomes (similarity 0.87)
• Religious primes influence even nonreligious people through mere cultural knowledge (similarity 0.86)
• Buddhist primes may reduce prejudice rather than increase it (similarity 0.82)
• Religious primes fail to affect atheists, disproving a purely ideomotor account (similarity 0.81)
• Religious priming affects nonreligious people too because secular worldviews retain religion’s legacy (similarity 0.81)
• Religious priming method does not meaningfully alter prejudice outcomes (similarity 0.81)
• Studying nonbelievers’ responses to religious primes requires nonconscious priming and independent belief measurement. (similarity 0.81)
• A small religious-priming prejudice effect can still matter cumulatively when widespread. (similarity 0.81)
• Theistic religious primes activate in-group identity while nontheistic ones activate universalism. (similarity 0.81)
• Nonconscious religious primes reliably affect believers but only inconsistently affect atheists. (similarity 0.81)
• Priming reminders activate religious moral behavior; beliefs alone do not (similarity 0.79)
• Eastern religious primes reduce prejudice more than Western ones do (similarity 0.79)
• Religious priming effects appear only in published, not unpublished, studies (similarity 0.79)
• Religious priming elevates prejudice against LGBT people and atheists beyond other targets. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Religious priming produces real but small and sometimes unreliable effects #expands (0.85) — Annetta Snell and Miron Zuckerman and Bonnie M. Le, Does Religious Priming Induce Greater…, 95
• Religious primes influence even nonreligious people through mere cultural knowledge #qualifies (0.80) — Annetta Snell and Miron Zuckerman and Bonnie M. Le, Does Religious Priming Induce Greater…, 94
• Nonconscious religious primes reliably affect believers but only inconsistently affect atheists. #qualifies (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 179
• Implicit religious priming only affects believers, not committed atheists #qualifies (0.70)