The effect of religious and reflective priming on cognitive biases and cognitive style -

Abstract

The effect of religious priming has been studied in relation to a number of variables, including prosocial behavior and racial prejudice. The effects of priming on cognitive domains, however, are relatively understudied. The present study examined the effects of religious priming, compared to reflective and neutral priming, on cognitive style and cognitive biases. Participants included students from the American University of Beirut who were randomly assigned to one of the three priming conditions. Priming was presented through the scrambled sentence task in which participants were required to rearrange words of a religious (e.g., pray), reflective (e.g., reason), or neutral (e.g., paper) content. Cognitive style was assessed through the Cognitive Reflection Task (CRT), a 3-item task measuring reflective thinking. The cognitive biases of interest included the conjunction fallacy and the base rate fallacy. Both are theoretically and empirically related to reflective thinking and were measured by a task containing one problem each. Results indicated that those undergoing the religious prime were significantly more likely to commit the conjunction fallacy compared to those in the reflective priming group. No such effect was found for the CRT and the base rate fallacy. Limitations and implications are discussed.