After God's Image, Prayer Leads People with Positive God Beliefs to Read Less Hostility in Others’ Eyes

Two experiments examined whether priming God images through prayer leads people who believe in a benign God to view social targets in a more favorable light. In Experiment 1, Dutch Christians either prayed for or thought about a person, and then judged the emotions of others in the Reading-the-Mind-in-the-Eyes Test. The results showed that prayer led participants to read fewer hostile emotions in others’ eyes, whereas prayer had no effect on perceiving positive emotions or non-hostile negative emotions. Experiment 2 extended this finding by showing that prayer only reduced social perceptions of hostility among participants with a positive God image. Thus, beliefs in a benign God may enhance interpersonal trust among believers, but only when God beliefs are cognitively accessible. These findings suggest that positive God beliefs may help to promote prosocial attitudes and cooperation within religious communities.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xs6-axxh
PID https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:nl:ui:13-xxgh-f3
Metadata Access https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:easy.dans.knaw.nl:easy-dataset:67942
Provenance
Creator Meijer-van Abbema, G.M.
Publisher Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
Contributor Koole, S.L.
Publication Year 2017
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; License: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Dataset
Format SPSS (SAV); SPS; DOC; PDF
Discipline Psychology; Social and Behavioural Sciences
Spatial Coverage The Netherlands