God Primes and Nietzsche
13th January 2012
Researchers asked 23 college adults to participate in a series of evaluation tasks. For the first evaluation task, participants were randomly assigned to read about a student website that contained either a speech about God or a speech about Pluto and its status as a planet. A series of filler tasks followed this, then a key behavior task. All participants did a taste test on a new cookie. They were left alone with the bag of cookies for ten minutes and told to consume at least one, but as many as they wished, then complete an evaluation of the product.
We predicted that participants who first read about God would display better temptation resistance (i.e., eat fewer cookies) than other participants. Consistent with this prediction, participants reminded of God ate fewer cookies (M = 2.82, SD = 1.54) than did control participants (M = 7.67, SD = 5.31), t(21) = 2.91, p < .01.
Jumping Jehoshaphat! Convert that t value into the Windowpane and you get a Large effect, 25/75! Read a speech about God, complete a bunch of unrelated tasks, and a few minutes later you eat about 3 cookies. Read a speech about Pluto, complete those same tasks, and you eat nearly 8 cookies.
Talk about self control! Talk about resisting temptation! Praise the Lord and pass by the cookie tray! Communion coming soon to Weight Watchers! McDonald’s is adding the Ten Commandments to its Menu!
!!!
This from a six study package exploring the cognitive and behavioral effects of thinking about God. I encourage you to read the report because it is interesting and complicated, but the main point falls from that cookie experiment. Thinking about God, especially as the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of All Things, affects self regulation and behavior, most interestingly here, that health behavior of eating.
You might recall an earlier Persuasion Blog post looking at a religion meta analysis on health behaviors, notably mortality. Here’s the main finding.
The results of the meta-analyses showed that religiosity/spirituality was associated with reduced mortality in healthy population studies (combined hazard ratio = 0.82, 95% CI = 0.76-0.87, p <0.001), but not in diseased population studies (combined hazard ratio = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.94-1.01, p = 0.19). Notably, the protective effect of religiosity/spirituality in the initially healthy population studies was independent of behavioral factors (smoking, drinking, exercising, and socioeconomic status), negative affect, and social support.
Of course, all that data is from Observational Research with convenience sample and the Windowpane is Small. But, if you believe the Tooth Fairy Tales from the Lifestyle Drum and Bugle Corps, you’ve also got to accept this finding as a True, too.
Whether thinking about God or visiting His houses, the Ultimate Ground of Being changes the way people will think, feel, and act. Self control. Moderation. Conscientiousness.
Ever want that from Other Guys? Persuading with God primes produces that Change!
Now. What has this got to do with Nietzsche? If you read the article you’ll find that across the six studies the researchers looked to see whether God primes worked only with Believers and especially not with Atheists. They reported no difference in thought or action between the two different groups. Even among nonbelievers, thinking about God produces change. To a modern atheist this sounds stupid because if you are an atheist, you don’t believe in God or even god, so how can this possibly happen? Nietzsche figured it out a hundred years ago.
Nietzsche argued that Western society lived in a God-saturated world and whether God was understood as the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim God or the God of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as the Prime Unmoved Mover, people still built their lives around an immaterial creative force. Thus, Nietzsche argued there really wasn’t much difference between deists and atheists because atheists still believed in Something that makes it all happen. For Nietzsche, the only difference between most atheists and deists of any stripe was merely the label. Whether you call it God or Variation With Selection, for example, it is still the Ultimate Ground of Being. Thus, Nietzsche would be unsurprised by these results.
Don’t preach. Just prime.
Laurin, K., Kay, A. C., & Fitzsimons, G. M. (2012). Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(1), 4-21.
doi:10.1037/a0025971