Our meta-analysis of religious priming now in press at PSPR
Azim’s paper with Aiyana Willard, Tess Andersen and Ara Norenzayan, Religious Priming: A meta-analysis with a focus on religious prosociality, has just been accepted at Personality and Social Psychology Review. The paper contains several effect size and p-curve analyses for 93 religious priming studies (n = 11, 653). The abstract is appended below, and the in press draft of the paper is available here. You can find a near comprehensive list of religious priming papers here. Many thanks to all the study authors who submitted and answered questions about their statistics.
Abstract:
Priming has emerged as a valuable tool within the psychological study of religion, allowing for tests of religion’s causal effect on a number of psychological outcomes, such as prosocial behavior. As the literature has grown, questions about the reliability and boundary conditions of religious priming have arisen. We use a combination of traditional effect size analyses, p-curve analyses, and adjustments for publication bias to evaluate the robustness of four types of religious priming (Analyses 1-3), review the empirical evidence for religion’s effect specifically on prosocial behavior (Analyses 4-5), and test whether religious priming effects generalize to individuals who report little or no religiosity (Analyses 6-7). Results across 93 studies and 11,653 participants show that religious priming has robust effects across a variety of outcome measures—prosocial measures included. Religious priming does not, however, reliably affect non-religious participants—suggesting that priming depends on the cognitive activation of culturally transmitted religious beliefs