“Speak of the Devil… and he Shall Appear”: Religiosity, Unconsciousness and the Effects of Explicit Priming in the Misperception of Immorality

Tsikandilakis, Myron; Qing Leong, Man; Yu, Zhaoliang; Paterakis, Georgios; Bali, Persefoni; Derrfuss, Jan; Mevel, Pierre-Alexis; Milbank, Alison; Tong Mun Wai Tong, Eddie; Madan, Christopher; Mitchell, Peter

Abstract

Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in sensitivity to immoral behaviors and cognition compared to non-religious individual. This effect could occur due to perceptual and physiological differences that religious and non-religious individuals experience when processing and responding to immoral stimuli. In this manuscript we employ masking to test this hypothesis. We run a series of experiments to explore whether religiosity could involve higher perceptual and physiological sensitivity to masked images relating to moral impropriety. We rate and pre-select IAPS images for moral impropriety. We present these images masked with and without negatively manipulating a pre-image moral label. We measure detection, moral discrimination, emotional and physiological responses. We found that religious participants experienced higher physiological and unbiased ROC perceptual sensitivity to masked images relating to moral impropriety when a negative moral label did not precede a masked image. When a negative moral label was presented, religious individuals experienced the interval following the label as more physiologically arousing and responded with lower specificity for discrimination. We suggest that religiosity could involve higher conscious perceptual and physiological sensitivity to morally improper stimuli but also higher susceptibility to moral classification.

Citation

Tsikandilakis, M., Qing Leong, M., Yu, Z., Paterakis, G., Bali, P., Derrfuss, J., …Mitchell, P. (2021). “Speak of the Devil… and he Shall Appear”: Religiosity, Unconsciousness and the Effects of Explicit Priming in the Misperception of Immorality. Psychological Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01461-7

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 7, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jan 23, 2021
• Publication Date: Jan 23, 2021
• Deposit Date: Dec 10, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 24, 2022
• Journal: Psychological Research
• Print ISSN: 0340-0727
• Electronic ISSN: 1430-2772
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01461-7
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5125122
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-020-01461-7