Implicit and Explicit Religious Preferences

1. Implicit and Explicit Religious Preferences Larisa Heiphetz, Elizabeth S. Spelke, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Harvard University INTRODUCTION Humans are sensitive to social group differences at an early age. Young children, for example, prefer those who share their race (Kowalski & Lo, 2001), gender (Martin, Fabes, Evans, & Wyman, 1999; Shutts, Banaji, & Spelke, in press), and native accent(Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007). However, previous work has not examined children’s religiously-based social preferences. Additionally, little work with adults has considered religion as an important intergroup domain. This neglect is surprising given that religion appears to be a cultural universal (Boyer, 2001), that religious diversity in the U.S. is increasing (Smith, 2002), and that scholars have examined the importance of religion in other domains, such as health (McCullough, Hoyt, Larson, Koenig, & Thoresen, 2000). The present work examines the development of people’s preferences for novel individuals who are Jewish or Christian. In Studies 1 and 2, 5-10 year old children and adults responded to questions about Jewish and Christian characters. Neither adults nor children showed an explicit preference, but adults demonstrated an implicit preference for Christianity over Judaism. Study 3 replicated the lack of explicit preference among children and demonstrated that Christian children share adults’ pro-Christian attitude. These findings suggest that Christians’ religious preferences remain stable over many years of development and that, on an explicit level, religious preferences may function differently among children than preferences for other types of groups. We discuss potential explanations for this effect. • STUDY 2 (CONTINUED) • Results and Discussion (continued). • Both Christian and non-Christian adults show an implicit pro-Christian preference. • Christians: t (31) = 5.44, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .98 • Non-Christians: t (24) = 4.00, p = .001, Cohen’s d = .82 • This dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes makes sense among adults. Similar dissociations have been found on other tests, including those measuring racial preference, and may be due to social desirability concerns (Nosek, 2007). • Previous work suggests that in other domains (e.g., race, Baron & Banaji, 2007), children and adults show similar implicit preferences. Might children show a similar pattern of results (e.g., an implicit preference for Christianity over Judaism) in the domain of religion? • GENERAL DISCUSSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS • Findings suggest that neither children nor adults show an explicit preference for individuals based on religious affiliation, though mechanisms may be different for children and adults (e.g., social desirability in adults but not in children). • Christian children and both Christian and non-Christian adults demonstrate an implicit preference for Christianity over Judaism, suggesting a dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes that may be continuous across many stages of development in some populations. • Given previous work on children’s explicit preferences, their lack of explicit preference in this study is surprising. Future research will explore potential reasons for this, including: • Differentiation. Perhaps children perceive Judaism and Christianity to be quite similar. In this case, they ought to show a preference when two very different religions (e.g., Christianity and Hinduism) are contrasted. • Nature of Task. Perhaps children do not apply preferences for religious groups in general to individual members of those groups. In this case, their implicit preferences ought to diminish if tested on an IAT using faces of Jewish and Christian individuals. STUDY 3 Participants. Volunteers were 46 children (22 girls) between the ages of 6 and 10 years (M = 7;9;57% Christian, 11% Jewish, and 32% Other). Procedure. Part 1 * Saw pairs of faces paired with religious objects. * Heard an explanation of the religious object. * Answered explicit questions (same as Study 1 with several exceptions: removed “Which of these children do you think had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch?”, added “Which of these children do you think is an American?”, and added “Which of these children do you think is more like you?” Example: • Future work could also examine the influence of beliefs and practices on religious preferences. Previous studies (e.g., Cohen, Siegel, & Rozin, 2003) suggest that Protestants consider faith more important than religious practice, whereas Jews do not. A pilot study conducted in our lab suggests that both Christians and non-Christians consider a person who holds traditional Christian beliefs to be a better Christian than a person who engages in traditional Christian practices. Future work can examine the differing influences of beliefs and practices on social preference in members of different religious groups. For example, do children prefer those who share their beliefs (but not their practices) or those who share their practices (but not their beliefs)? • STUDY 1 • Participants.Participants were 83 children (42 girls) aged 5-10 years (M = 6;7). Participants varied in religion (39% Christian, 24% Jewish, and 36% Other). • Procedure. Participants heard two stories, one describing a Christian character and another describing a Jewish character, and then answered a variety of questions: • Good Behavior / Preference (e.g., which of these children made cookies for their friends? which would you rather be friends with?) • Bad Behavior (e.g., which of these children stole a toy?) • Ostensibly Neutral Control (which of these children had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?) • Results and Discussion. “This girl is Jewish, and she celebrates Hanukkah by lighting candles in a menorah. Have you ever seen a menorah like this before? Here is a picture of a menorah down here.” “This girl is Christian, and she celebrates Easter by painting Easter eggs. Here is a picture of some Easter eggs down here.” “One of these children helped her friends with their schoolwork. Which one of them do you think did that?” “Which of these children do you think is an American?” CONCLUSION Across three studies, we found that neither children nor adults showed a preference between novel Jewish and Christian individuals. However, Christian children and both Christian and non-Christian adults showed an implicit pro-Christian attitude. These findings suggest that the seeds of implicit religious preferences may be sown early, as young as age six. Additionally, explicit religious preferences may function differently than explicit preferences in other domains, such as race and gender – areas in which young children demonstrate clear explicit biases. Future work will examine possible explanations for this difference. • REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS • Baron, A. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). The development of implicit attitudes: Evidence of race evaluations from ages 6 and 10 and adulthood. Psychological Science, 17, 53-58. • Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York, NY: Basic Books. • Cohen, A. B., Siegel, J. I., & Rozin, P. (2003). Faith versus practice: Different bases for religiosity judgments by Jews and Protestants. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 287-295. • Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit social cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480. • Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E. S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. PNAS, 104, 12577-12580. • Kowalski, K., & Lo, Y. F. (2001). The influence of perceptual features, ethnic labels, and sociocultural information on the development of ethnic/racial bias in young children. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 444-455. • Martin, C. L., Fabes, R. A., Evans, S. M., & Wyman, H. (1999). Social cognition on the playground: Children’s beliefs about playing with girls versus boys and their relations to sex segregated play. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 16, 751-771. • McCullough, M. E., Hoyt, W. T., Larson, D. B., Koenig, H. G., & Thoresen, C. (2000). Religious involvement and mortality: A meta-analytic review. Health Psychology, 19, 211-222. • Nosek, B. A. (2007). Implicit-explicit relations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 65-69. • Smith, T.W. (2002). Religious diversity in America: The emergence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 577-585. • Shutts, K., Banaji, M. R., & Spelke, E. S. (In press). Social categories guide young children’s preferences for novel objects. • We thank Andrew Baron for assistance with the Child IAT and Danielle Hinchey, Jacqueline Pires, and Katherine Warren for assistance with data collection. This research was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to LH and NIH Grant #5R01HD23103-26 to ES. • For more information, please contact Larisa Heiphetz (larisa@wjh.harvard.edu). • Children did not show consistent explicit preferences for either character. • The majority (57%) of children selected the Christian character in response to our control question; however, this difference was not significant, p > .10. • How do children’s responses compare with adults’? Part 2: Completed a Child Jewish-Christian IAT (Baron & Banaji, 2006) using symbols seen previously (e.g., menorah, Easter eggs) as well as good and bad words (e.g., nice, mean). Results and Discussion. • STUDY 2 • Participants.Volunteers were 58 adults (30 women). They were aged 18-53 years (M = 31;11) and were 57% Christian, 3% Jewish, and 40% Other. • Procedure. Participants followed the same procedure as Study 1 with several notable exceptions: • Rather than hearing each story read aloud, adults read quietly to themselves and responded to questions in a questionnaire packet. • The social preference questions were changed to reflect our older sample (e.g., “Which of these children would you like to babysit?” rather than, “Which of these children would you like to be friends with?”) • After answering a series of explicit questions, adults completed an evaluative Jewish-Christian Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). • Replicated null effects from Study 1 except for social preference among non-Christians, which was driven by the fact that non-Christians preferred to invite the Jewish character to a party (Ns = 12 vs. 3, p = .035, binomial test). • Christians were more likely to think that the Christian character was American and that the Christian character was more like them (Ns = 23 vs. 7 for both tests, p = .005, binomial test). • Non-Christians were more likely to think that the Jewish character was more like them • (Ns = 12 vs. 2, p = .013, binomial test). • Like adults, Christian children showed an implicit preference for Christianity, t (27) = 3.93, p = .001, Cohen’s d = .76. However, the effect size is smaller than that obtained from the adult sample, suggesting that this preference becomes stronger as people age. • Non-Christian children showed a trend in the opposite direction, tending to show a preference for Judaism over Christianity, t (14) = -1.87, p = .083, Cohen’s d = -.45. This suggests that non-Christians may learn to show a preference for the dominant group later in life (after age 10, the oldest age tested in this study). Results and Discussion. Adults performed similarly to our child sample on all explicit questions, with one exception. Adults were more likely to say that the Christian character had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch (67% vs. 33%, p = .012, binomial test). Adults also demonstrated an implicit pro-Christian preference. Note: Positive scores indicate faster reaction times when pairing Christian + good / Jewish + bad. Negative scores indicate faster reaction times when pairing Jewish + good / Christian + bad.