Influence of religious priming on time perception and informational conformity

Hanna Negami
March 31, 2014

Overview

What I will be covering today:

  • Rationale
  • Study purpose
  • Procedure
  • Hypotheses
  • Future directions

Can churches inspire religious feeling?


How can our immediate environment influence cognition?

Can churches inspire religious feeling?

The present study will draw on:

  • Religious priming
  • Awe

To answer these questions:

  • How do church interiors affect time perception?
  • Do church interiors elicit awe?
  • Do they prime people to be more conforming?
  • Do they make people feel more religious or spiritual?

Historical background

Churches have historically held many important social functions

  • space for religious and civic ritual
  • marketplace
  • theater
  • sanctuary

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Religious Monumental Architecture (RMA)

Joye & Verpooten (2013) argue that RMA:

  • elicits awe
  • fosters religious openness
  • facilitates vertical social stratification and social cohesion

What is awe?

Defined by Keltner & Haidt (2003) as encompassing:

  • vastness
  • accommodation

canyon

Awe & Religion

  • Awe increases belief in supernatural control & intentional pattern perception (Valdesolo & Graham, 2014)
  • Awe increases feelings of oneness with others and spiritual behavioral intention among people who are religious or spiritual (Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012)

The present study

Tying together work on awe and religious priming:

Can photographs of church interiors work simultaneously as a prime for religious concepts and as awe-inducing stimuli?

present

What I seek to replicate: Awe

  • Awe expands one's sense of time: e.g., “I have lots of time in which I can get things done.” (Rudd, Vohs, & Aaker, 2012)

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The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí

What I seek to replicate: Religious Priming

Priming: “a nonconscious form of memory that involves a change in a person’s ability to identify, produce or classify an item as a result of a previous encounter with that item or a related item” (Schacter, Dobbins, & Schnyer, 2004).

Examples of semantic primes:

heaven, miracle, wedding, spirituality, angel, praise, baptism, tradition, aureole, salvation, soul, beatitude, Christmas, belief, bless, faith, temple, pilgrimage, prayer, communion
(Van Cappellen et al. 2011)

What I seek to replicate: Religious Priming

  • Among people with dispositional submissiveness, being primed with religious words increased the likelihood of their conforming to peers’ responses on a numerical estimation task (Van Cappellen et al. 2011)

Study Purpose

To investigate the effects of interior church architecture, using photographic stimuli, on participants’

  • religiosity, spirituality,
  • time perception, and
  • informational conformity.

Procedure

Participants will be randomly assigned to one of two conditions:

  • religious prime
  • non-religious prime

Procedure

procedure

Deception study

  • Partial disclosure: “You are invited to participate in a research study measuring the influence of a visual display on time perception and numerical estimation through a series of computer-based tasks.”
  • Mild deception: numerical estimation task

Time-perception/religious priming task

time-1

Time-perception/religious priming task

time-2

Time-perception/religious priming task

time-3

Numerical estimation task (informational conformity measure)


num

Numerical estimation task (informational conformity measure)


num-est

Numerical estimation task

num-procedure

Procedure

procedure

Emotion survey

  • Angry
  • Awe
  • Sad
  • Happy
  • Calm
  • Bored
  • Excited
  • Afraid

(Rudd, Vohs, & Aaker, 2012)

Demographics form

  • Religious affiliation

Religiosity Survey

  • “Religion is important to me”
  • “Without God the world would be meaningless”

(Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012)

Spirituality

Universality

  • “All life is interconnected”
  • “I believe that there is a larger meaning to life”

Connectedness

  • “It is important for me to give something back to my community”
  • “Although there is good and bad in people, I believe that humanity as a whole is basically good”

(Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012)

Personality survey

Dispositional submissiveness

  • “ Need the approval of others”
  • “Do what others do”

(Van Cappellen et al. 2011)

Hypotheses

Awe, time perception, religiosity, spirituality

  • religious prime > non-religious prime

Informational conformity

  • religious prime > non-religious prime, among those with dispositional submissiveness

Implications

  • our aesthetic environment influences us on many levels
  • emotion regulation
  • architectural design

Can churches inspire religious feeling?

  • How do church interiors affect time perception?
  • Do church interiors elicit awe?
  • Do they prime people to be more conforming?
  • Do they make people feel more religious or spiritual?

procedure-2

Future Directions

  • Explore order effects of the prime photos
  • Does non-religious architecture tap into similar effects?
  • Are the effects a function of the building being religious or transcendental? Would a government building have the same effect? Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Thank you

U.R.L. (Urban Realities Lab) lab