Psych of religion unit 4 practice

voluntary, intentional actions taken to benefit others and the group as a whole

• Antisocial behavior

• Prosocial behavior

voluntary, intentional actions that violate social norms and cause harm to

• Prosocial behavior

• Antisocial behavior

religious people are more prosocial than nonreligious people when religion is directly on the mind

• Priming/salience

• Ingroup bias

religious people are more prosocial than nonreligious people toward coreligionists (people of the same religion)

• Ingroup bias

• Priming/salience

o Ash’s research (beginning in the 1950s) found that people expressed agreement with others' visual estimation of line length, even when others were blatantly inaccurate

Later studies found that when primed with religion, participants (particularly those low on assertiveness) were more likely to conform to others’ estimation

• Social Conformity—Solomon Asch

• Obedience to Authority—Stanley Milgram

o Film recommendation: The Experimenter (2015)

o Milgram’s research (beginning in the 1960s) found that most participants obeyed authority figures’ commands to administer shocks to another person, even when they believed the shocks could cause serious harm.

 Overall findings have held up over multiple studies and across time

• Obedience to Authority—Stanley Milgram

• Social Conformity—Solomon Asch

participants were randomly assigned to read a list of words that were either religious or not religious (Saroglou et al., 2009)

 Then, an authority figure (the experimenter) pretended to have been criticized by another participant and encouraged the actual participant to get revenge by assigning the other participant a harder task

 When primed with religion, participants low on assertiveness were more likely to go along with the experimenter’s suggestion

• laboratory experiment

• survey study

participants completed questionnaires about respect for authority, traditionalism, and whether it was moral to disobey different kinds of authority figures: religious leaders (conservative), civil rights leaders (liberal), or judges (neutral) (Mallinas et al., 2020)

• survey study

• laboratory experiment

was positively correlated with believing that disobeying any authority figure was immoral

• Respect for authority

• Traditionalism

was positively correlated with believing disobeying religious leaders was immoral, negatively correlated with believing disobeying civil rights leaders was immoral, and unrelated to beliefs about disobeying judges

• Traditionalism

• Respect for authority