Showing papers by "Michael E. McCullough published in 2021"

Does religion make people more self-controlled? A review of research from the lab and life

Abstract: Religion is associated with a wide range of socially desirable behaviors and outcomes (particularly among adolescents), including lower rates of crime and delinquency, better school performance, and abstinence from risky sexual practices and substance use. What should we make of these associations? Are they causal? And if so, what are the intermediate psychological processes through which religion obtains its effects on such outcomes? With regard to this third question, we describe a decade's worth of research into a hypothesis that religion obtains its behavioral effects through its intermediate effects on self-control. In this review, we focus on evidence from experiments and longitudinal studies, which provide more rigorous tests of cause-and-effect relationships than simple cross-sectional correlational studies can. We find little convincing evidence for the idea that implicit and explicit activations of religious cognition in the laboratory exert a robust influence on self-control on the scale of minutes and hours. We do find evidence, however, that rituals (most notably, prayer), along with exposure to religious environments and institutions in the real world (e.g. religious schooling) influence self-control on the scale of weeks, months, and years — a conclusion that is also supported by rigorous longitudinal research.

The sex premium in religiously motivated moral judgment.

Abstract: Recent theorizing suggests that religious people’s moral convictions are quite strategic (albeit unconsciously so), designed to make their worlds more amenable to their favored approaches to solving life’s basic challenges. In a meta-analysis of 5 experiments and a preregistered replication, we find that religious identity places a sex premium on moral judgments, causing people to judge violations of conventional sexual morality as particularly objectionable. The sex premium is especially strong among highly religious people, and applies to both legal and illegal acts. Religion’s influence on moral reasoning emphasizes conventional sexual norms, and may reflect the strategic projects to which religion has been applied throughout history. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Experimental evidence that apologies promote forgiveness by communicating relationship value.

Abstract: Robust evidence supports the importance of apologies for promoting forgiveness. Yet less is known about how apologies exert their effects. Here, we focus on their potential to promote forgiveness by way of increasing perceptions of relationship value. We used a method for directly testing these causal claims by manipulating both the independent variable and the proposed mediator. Namely, we use a 2 (Apology: yes vs. no) × 2 (Value: high vs. low) concurrent double-randomization design to test whether apologies cause forgiveness by affecting the same causal pathway as relationship value. In addition to supporting this causal claim, we also find that apologies had weaker effects on forgiveness when received from high-value transgressors, suggesting that the forgiveness-relevant information provided by apologies is redundant with relationship value. Taken together, these findings from a rigorous methodological paradigm help us parse out how apologies promote relationship repair.