Playing for God’s Team

The Influence of Belief in the Supernatural on Perceptions of Religious, Spiritual, and Natural Cues

Bibliographic Data

ID12823213
AuthorsVirginia Periss (Florida Atlantic University, corresponding author), David F Bjorklund (0000-0001-7599-6939, Florida Atlantic University)
Year2016
Volume16
Issue3-4
Pages215-244
Publication date2016-09-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Cognition and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1567-7095 • E-ISSN: 1568-5373
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/15685373-12342178
OpenAlexW2524214791
LanguageEN
References cited31

Adherence to religious belief may serve to promote group cohesion and cooperation by decreasing the costs associated with social exchange. Consistent with this, organized religious ideologies, unlike secular or spiritual based ideologies, have been argued to facilitate cooperation among individuals living in large-scale societies. In the current study, we examined whether hypothetical adults’ explanations of natural events focused on religious ideologies were more effective at eliciting positive-affect compared to spiritual or natural explanations. Results revealed that religious cues were more effective than spiritual cues in eliciting perceptions of positive-affect, but only when participant religiosity was taken into account. Participants high in religiosity favored the religious cues over the spiritual and natural cues, whereas participants high in spirituality showed no preferences. Conversely, participants low in religious belief demonstrated not only a positive bias towards the natural explanations, but also rated the adults expressing the supernatural explanations, in particular the religious explanations, as having greater negative-affect. From an evolutionary perspective, we interpreted the results as providing support that some forms of supernatural thinking, typical of organized religion, are more effective at eliciting feelings of positive and negative affect compared to supernatural beliefs not rooted in organized religion

Affect (linguistics · Belief in God · Epistemology · Feeling · Ideology · Natural (archaeology · Perception · Politics · Religiosity · Religious belief · Religious identity · Spirituality · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub