Unconscious God-priming in word games raised Dictator Game giving.

Evidence

We recruited participants in Vancouver, Canada, and under the pretext of playing word games, we planted thoughts of God (divine, God, spirit) in some of them without their conscious awareness. Other participants played the same word game without religious content. A third group of participants were randomly assigned to play the exact same word game, but with words such as civic, jury, and police-thereby priming them with thoughts of secular moral authority. Then all participants took part in the so-called Dictator Game, in which each participant could act like a dictator and could choose to share any portion of $10 with an anonymous stranger. They were reassured that their decision would remain confidential, and they would not meet this anonymous stranger, minimizing any concerns about disapproval or retaliation. This widely used procedure ensures a “pure” measure of participants’ generosity that is not influenced by any reciprocity incentives. It is as close to a situation as one can get, where “no one is watching.” Do participants act differently if they think, unconsciously, “God is watching?” The results showed that they did: • Givers with God on their minds offered nearly double the money compared to givers who saw neutral words prior to making their decision. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 138

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘no one is watching’ experimental setup is the empirical mirror of Rodrigues’s belief in an omnipresent observer in Silence.
• SHARE: The word-game priming method masking religious content is a clean methodological nugget for anyone running behavioral experiments.