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Abstract
In evolutionary approaches to religion it is argued that belief in supernatural agents is strongly related to a perceptual bias to over-detect the presence of agents in the environment. We report five experiments that investigate whether processing concepts about supernatural agents facilitates agency detection. Participants were presented with point-light stimuli representing unscrambled or scrambled biological motion, or with pictures of unscrambled or scrambled faces, embedded in a noise mask. Participants were required to indicate for each stimulus whether it represented a human agent or not. Each trial was preceded by a supernatural agent prime, a human agent prime, or an animal prime. Our results showed that primes referring to humans facilitated the detection of agency. More importantly, however, results did not reveal a general effect of supernatural priming on agency detection. In three experiments, a moderating effect of religiosity was observed: supernatural agent primes had a differential effect for religious compared to non-religious participants on agency detection biases and the speed of responding to agent-like stimuli. These findings qualify the relation between supernatural beliefs and agency detection and suggest that when supernatural agent concepts have been acquired through cultural learning, these concepts can modulate agency-detection biases.
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Notes
1. It is important to note that explicit semantic priming differs from implicit conceptual priming methods. The latter have typically been used to investigate the effects of the activation of religious concepts (Carpenter & Marshall, Citation2009; Pichon et al., Citation2007; Saroglou et al., Citation2009; Shariff & Norenzayan, Citation2007; Van Cappellen et al., Citation2011). A major methodological difference between semantic priming and conceptual priming is that the first allows the use of primes from different conceptual categories as a within-subjects manipulation (the same participant is subjected to all experimental manipulations), whereas the latter typically relies on between-subjects manipulations (i.e., different groups of participants are presented with different experimental manipulations). Given the strong sensitivity of our dependent measure to individual differences (i.e., individual differences in agency detection; Riekki et al., Citation2013; van Elk, Citation2013), semantic priming was preferred over conceptual priming, as it should result in increased statistical power to detect differences between primes (Greenwald, Citation1976).
2. We preferred using these cognitive measures of agency detection over alternative measures (e.g., the snowy pictures task; cf. Whitson & Galinsky, Citation2008), because in this way we could specifically test for effects of the activation of supernatural agent concepts on agency detection rather than on mere pattern perception.
3. In all experiments we also measured church attendance (i.e., “How often do you visit a church / mosque / temple?”; 1 = never, 7 = very often). This measure is more closely related to extrinsic than to intrinsic religiosity, and was not included in the analyses.
4. The posterior probability favoring the alternative hypothesis, p(H1∣D), can be derived by subtracting the posterior probability favoring the null hypothesis, p(H0∣D), from 1 (i.e., p(H0∣D) + p(H1∣D) = 1).
5. This finding may seem contrary to our initial expectations (i.e., enhanced agency detection expected for supernatural prime words). However, we note that religiosity only moderated the perceptual sensitivity (i.e., indicating how well participants distinguished signal from noise) and not the response bias (i.e., indicating to what extent participants were biased toward saying “yes”) – which was the measure of agency detection for which we primarily expected effects in our experiments.
6. Thus, in contrast to Experiment 3A, we did not observe an effect of human primes on the categorization of face/house stimuli. The absence of a priming effect may be related to the less controlled experimental setting (i.e., the study was conducted as a field experiment in a noisy environment) and the specific population that was tested in this study (i.e., paranormal believers may differ on a number of variables from the students that were tested in the other experiments).
7. The interaction reflected that for believing participants, human primes affected the categorization of face/house stimuli of low levels of visual noise, whereas for non-believing participants, human primes affected the categorization of face/house stimuli of high levels of visual noise.
8. In fact, the design of the experiment was similar to Experiments 3A and 3B, but instead of including pictures representing different levels of visual noise, we included only undistorted pictures of faces and houses.
9. Please note that the directionality of this effect is contrary to our expectations (i.e., we expected that supernatural priming should facilitate rather than impair agency detection). Several potential mechanisms could underlie this effect (e.g., the trait attribution task may be attentionally more demanding, thereby resulting in impaired performance on subsequent tasks; the trait attribution task may induce a negativity bias, as some supernatural agents clearly have negative associations, thereby impairing subsequent performance). However, given the small size of the effect, the lack of specificity of the effect (i.e., a general impairment in the detection of both faces and houses), we believe that this effect does not warrant strong conclusions regarding the relation between religious priming and agency detection.
10. Data from Experiment 4 was not included in the meta-analysis as only stimuli without visual noise were included in that experiment and the dependent measure consisted of reaction times rather than categorization of the stimuli.
11. For Experiment 3A and 3B we defined animal prime words as a control category and for Experiment 5 we defined the syllable count task as a control category.