Guided by God: Consulting Divine Omniscience During Decision Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To confront difficult decisions, religious believers commonly seek guidance from sacred sources of knowledge, such as an all-knowing God. We predicted that engaging in this practice may be related to decision satisfaction. Specifically, across three studies (N = 2,474; two pre-registered), and three countries (U.S. Sweden, Canada), we explored whether religious believers who report consulting God during decisions experienced greater decision and life satisfaction, particularly when they also held a belief in God’s omniscience. Religious people who consulted God during decisions reported increased life satisfaction initially (Study 1a), and over time (Study 1b). Further, consistent with the proposed mechanism, when consulting God for guidance, participants who perceived God as especially omniscient (but not omnipotent or predictable) experienced greater decision satisfaction for past decisions (Study 2), anticipated future decisions (Study 2), and immediately following a decision (Study 3). Findings suggest that religious believers may benefit from seeking guidance from an omniscient God.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".