Do reminders of God increase willingness to take risks?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many people, and American Christians in particular, view God as a benevolent protector. Those who believe in God may therefore expect that they can safely engage in potentially risky activities, secure in the knowledge that God will look out for their best interests and ensure good outcomes. Initial experiments supported this hypothesis, but recent attempts to replicate them failed. This unreliable pattern may reflect a false conceptual hypothesis, or an inadequate method: Both the initial reports and the replication attempts used outdated religious priming methods we now know to be ineffective. The present research aimed to clarify the relationship between thinking about God and risk-taking behaviors. A pilot study (N = 264) showed that American Christians do expect that God will protect them during risky activities; moreover, those who hold this expectation more strongly report greater willingness to take risks. This registered report then used a high-powered preregistered experiment to test whether having participants explicitly think about God’s (presumably protective) influence over what happens in their lives increases their willingness to take risks. Results confirmed that American Christian participants were more willing to take non-moral risks when thinking about God, compared to a control condition, d = 0.28, 95% CI [0.12, 0.44], p < .001. This pattern was robust to different exclusion criteria and was consistent across domains of career, recreational, and social risks. By using the most recent and sensitive methods, this study provides a more definitive test of the conceptual hypothesis that thinking about God can influence risk-taking.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".