The Implicit Nature of Intrinsic Religious Pursuit

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to demonstrate the implicit (nonconscious) activation and operation of goals related to religious pursuit. Participants focused on either religious successes or religious shortcomings. Moskowitz (2001 Blair, I. V. 2001. “Implicit stereotypes and prejudice.”. In Cognitive social psychology: Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition Edited by: Moskowitz, G. B. 359–374. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.. [Google Scholar], 2002 Moskowitz, G. B. 2002. Preconscious effects of temporary goals on attention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38: 397–404. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) argued that focusing on shortcomings in a goal-relevant domain (in this case, religion) creates a sense of incompleteness that, in turn, activates cognitive processes that seek to compensate for the incompleteness. In Experiment 1, the activation of compensatory processes slowed participants' response times to goal-relevant information on a color-identification task. In Experiment 2, the operation of compensatory processes was manifested when participants spent more time reading a subsequent passage with religious content. The results have implications for the motivational nature of intrinsic religious pursuit.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.