Studying nonbelievers’ responses to religious primes requires nonconscious priming and independent belief measurement.

Evidence

Although it is a simple question, the answer is complex. To answer this question, we need to consult studies that satisfy three criteria. First, religious priming must bypass conscious awareness. Otherwise, atheists, who by definition do not consciously believe in gods, would be unresponsive to reminders of such belief. Second, research participants’ religious beliefs or lack thereof should be measured independent of the priming procedure. This seems obvious, but regrettably, in several studies researchers have failed to establish the prevalence of nonbelief in their samples. Third, measures that are known to be responsive to religious priming (such as cooperativeness, or feelings of being watched) should be used. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 178

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Methodological rigor criteria map to the reader’s analytical frame: the priming mechanism is the ‘omniscient gaze’ enforcement channel, and the atheist test condition is what makes the Big God mechanism falsifiable.

Related

• Religious primes fail to affect atheists, disproving a purely ideomotor account (similarity 0.90)
• Atheists’ unresponsiveness to God primes rules out ideomotor explanations (similarity 0.89)
• Nonconscious religious primes reliably affect believers but only inconsistently affect atheists. (similarity 0.88)
• Type of religious prime may not moderate prejudice outcomes (similarity 0.83)
• Religious priming produces real but small and sometimes unreliable effects (similarity 0.83)
• Religious priming effects are testable against the ideomotor alternative (similarity 0.83)
• Religious primes influence even nonreligious people through mere cultural knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Religious priming boosts prosocial behavior only for believers, not non-believers. (similarity 0.83)
• Priming reminders activate religious moral behavior; beliefs alone do not (similarity 0.82)
• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind. (similarity 0.82)
• Atheism has multiple independent causal pathways, not one (similarity 0.82)
• God priming increases both generosity and felt watching only in believers (similarity 0.82)
• Religious primes vary in depth of awareness and mechanism of effect (similarity 0.82)
• Priming analytical thinking via a statue causes an immediate religious belief dip. (similarity 0.81)
• Beliefs change behavior only when they enter conscious awareness (similarity 0.81)