Alexandra Snell, Miron Zuckerman, and Bonnie M. Le — Does Religious Priming Induce Greater Prejudice? A Meta-Analytic Review

Yield

23 of 152 paragraphs kept (15.1%). Target: 35%+ — ⚠️ BELOW target.

Thesis

Religion fosters prejudice via intergroup bias, meaning-making threat, and authoritarianism. · ch. 0

Argument

1. Religiously motivated prosociality targets in-groups and racism targets outgroups — ch. 0
2. Religiosity-prejudice links are correlational, not established as causal — ch. 0
3. Prior religion-prejudice meta-analyses were purely correlational and each studied one target group. — ch. 0
4. Meta-analytic inclusion relied on self-relevant theistic primes to activate in-group identity. — ch. 0
5. Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists — ch. 0 └─ #qualifies-own → Buddhist primes may reduce prejudice rather than increase it └─ #qualifies-own → Prejudice may drive people toward religion, not only vice versa
6. Conservative values partly mediate the link between religiosity and racism — ch. 0
7. A small priming effect can still matter if widely applied over time — ch. 1
8. The studies lack power to test cross-category moderation by target group. — ch. 1
9. Religious priming transfers prejudice most strongly toward LGBT and atheist targets — ch. 1
10. The publication effect on priming prejudice results vanishes once confounding moderators are controlled — ch. 1
11. Religious priming effects appear only in published, not unpublished, studies — ch. 1 └─ #qualifies-own → Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists
12. Religious cues affect nonreligious people as well because secular cultures preserve their meanings. — ch. 1
13. The file drawer would need 558 null studies to overturn the priming effect. — ch. 1
14. Religious priming method does not meaningfully alter prejudice outcomes — ch. 2
15. Prejudice may drive people toward religion, not only vice versa — ch. 2
16. Buddhist primes may reduce prejudice rather than increase it — ch. 2
17. Buddhist priming lowers prejudice but not uniformly across targets — ch. 2

Annotation Roundup

Question

• Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists — The heterogeneity across primes and target groups begs the question of whether a moderator (priming method, target group, etc.) drives the mixed results.
• Meta-analytic inclusion relied on self-relevant theistic primes to activate in-group identity. — Worth checking whether religious primes can ever activate universalistic rather than in-group values, or whether that framing itself biases results — the authors present it as a settled assumption.
• Religious priming effects appear only in published, not unpublished, studies — The core threat to the entire priming effect — whether file-drawer nulls would nullify it — and whether this generalizes beyond religious priming.
• Religious priming transfers prejudice most strongly toward LGBT and atheist targets — Do these two targets share a moderator (both are perceived as overtly antireligious/secular or value-threatening) that a transfer hypothesis would predict, versus targets like Black or Arab people?
• Religious priming effects appear only in published, not unpublished, studies — Are the outgroup-target (cross-category transfer) studies concentrated in the published set that shows the effect?
• Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists — The ‘sex premium’ explanation implies a domain-specific mechanism (moral judgments of sexuality) that might predict cross-category transfer would FAIL, which bears directly on the reader’s research question.
• Buddhist primes may reduce prejudice rather than increase it — This suggests religious priming effects may be religion- and culture-specific — worth checking what drivers (dogmatism/rigidity) mediate in Western monotheistic contexts.
• Prejudice may drive people toward religion, not only vice versa — The reverse causal direction — prejudice motivating attraction to religion — is an untested but plausible mechanism worth chasing.
• Religious priming method does not meaningfully alter prejudice outcomes — Whether priming method truly doesn’t matter remains unresolved given low statistical power of .71; a higher-powered replication could find moderation. Xref
• Religiosity-prejudice links are correlational, not established as causal — This instability across target groups and religiosity measures points to the conditional nature of priming effects that later chapters test.
• Religious priming transfers prejudice most strongly toward LGBT and atheist targets — Connects to the reading purpose — whether outgroup hostility transfers across different target categories rather than only within the primed outgroup.
• Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists — Directly relevant to the reading purpose: 44-study meta-analysis testing whether priming transfers prejudice — place alongside the cross-category transfer question.
• Religious priming effects appear only in published, not unpublished, studies — Directly central to the reading purpose on cross-category hostility transfer — publication bias qualifies the strength of any transfer effect found.
• The publication effect on priming prejudice results vanishes once confounding moderators are controlled — Directly relevant to the reader’s 44-study target: confirms that an apparent publication-status difference is better explained by correlated design features (self-reports, target type, location) than by genuine file-drawer bias — a key quality check for cross-category conclusions.
• The studies lack power to test cross-category moderation by target group. — Directly relevant to the reader’s goal: an adequately powered direct test of whether religious priming transfers hostility across DIFFERENT target categories has apparently not been done - this is the gap the reader is probing.
• Religious cues affect nonreligious people as well because secular cultures preserve their meanings. — Norris and Inglehart’s ‘legacy of religious traditions shaping worldviews even in secular societies’ parallels ideas about cultural residue/cryptomnesia that Norenzayan and others invoke to explain secular persistence of religious intuitions.
• Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists — This connects to the reader’s interest in whether religious priming transfers outgroup hostility across DIFFERENT target categories - here LGBT and atheist targets load together but the effect did not reliably generalize to other categories tested.
• Religious priming causally increases prejudice toward LGBT people and atheists — Directly answers the reader’s core interest: religious in-group priming transfers hostility to outgroup targets, but here the targets are specifically LGBT and atheists — so cross-category transfer is confirmed but narrow.
• Buddhist primes may reduce prejudice rather than increase it — Connects to the reader’s reading on religious in-group priming transfer; this qualifies that the target specificity found may not generalize to non-monotheistic primes.
• Buddhist priming lowers prejudice but not uniformly across targets — Connects to the reader’s meta-analysis purpose: this suggests the religion-to-prejudice link may be specific to monotheistic dogmatism-rigidity drivers, not religion per se. Seed
• The studies lack power to test cross-category moderation by target group. — The stated need for ‘a large range of targets, allowing adequately powered tests of moderation by target group’ is essentially a research agenda for the reader’s own meta-analytic question about cross-category hostility transfer.
• Buddhist priming lowers prejudice but not uniformly across targets — Angle for an essay: does cultural/religious framing (dogmatism-rigidity) rather than religiosity itself drive prejudice transfer effects? Define
• Prior religion-prejudice meta-analyses were purely correlational and each studied one target group. — Positions the distinct value of this meta-analysis: causal experimental designs across diverse target groups, rather than single-group correlational syntheses.
• Religion fosters prejudice via intergroup bias, meaning-making threat, and authoritarianism. — Defines religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism as distinct mechanisms connecting religion to prejudice.
• Meta-analytic inclusion relied on self-relevant theistic primes to activate in-group identity. — Clarifies the ‘self-relevance’ and ‘theistic-only’ inclusion criteria that define what counts as valid religious priming in this literature.