The spiritual contagion scale: A measure of beliefs in the transfer of metaphysical properties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Contagion is the belief that an entity's invisible or essential qualities can be transferred to a target. Researchers studying contagion have often distinguished between physical contagion (the perceived transfer of germs, toxins, and pathogens) and spiritual contagion (the perceived transfer of metaphysical properties such as spirits, essence, and moral characteristics). While sensitivity to physical contagion is a component of several existing scales, to date, there are no scales that measure sensitivity to spiritual contagion. Here, we develop and validate a measure of Spiritual Contagion Sensitivity (SCS), which considers positive, negative, and neutral aspects of spiritual contagion. We demonstrate discriminant validity from existing measures of physical contagion sensitivity, such as perceived vulnerability to disease and disgust sensitivity (Study 1). We demonstrate construct validity by showing the correlation between SCS and a variety of published findings in the literature for which spiritual contagion beliefs have been hypothesized to play a role (Study 2). Finally, we demonstrate predictive utility of the SCS scale by showing significant moderation of spiritual contagion effects from the literature (Studies 3A–3C).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".