Aveyard Mark E
Department of International Studies, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
PLoS One. 2014 Jul 3;9(7):e99447. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0099447. eCollection 2014.
Two experiments with Middle Eastern participants explored the generalizability of prior research on religious priming and moral behavior to a novel cultural and religious context. Participants in Experiment 1 completed a sentence unscrambling task with religious or non-religious content (in Arabic) before taking an unsupervised math test on which cheating was possible and incentivized. No difference in honesty rates emerged between the two groups, failing to extend findings from previous research with similar stimuli. Experiment 2 tested the effects of the athan, the Islamic call to prayer, using the same design. This naturalistic religious prime produced higher rates of honesty (68%) compared to controls who did not hear the call to prayer (53%).These results raise the possibility that the psychological mechanisms used by religion to influence moral behavior might differ between religions and cultures, highlighting an avenue of exploration for future research. The experiments here also address two growing concerns in psychological science: that the absence of replications casts doubt on the reliability of original research findings, and that the Westernized state of psychological science casts doubt on the generalizability of such work.
两项针对中东参与者的实验探讨了先前关于宗教启动与道德行为的研究在一种全新文化和宗教背景下的普遍性。实验1的参与者在参加一项无人监考且有作弊激励机制的数学测试之前，先完成了一项（用阿拉伯语）对包含宗教或非宗教内容的句子进行解乱的任务。两组之间在诚实率上没有差异，未能拓展先前使用类似刺激物的研究结果。实验2采用相同设计测试了伊斯兰教宣礼（azan）的影响。与未听到宣礼声的对照组（53%）相比，这种自然主义的宗教启动产生了更高的诚实率（68%）。这些结果增加了一种可能性，即宗教用来影响道德行为的心理机制可能因宗教和文化而异，凸显了未来研究的一个探索方向。这里的实验还解决了心理科学中两个日益受到关注的问题：缺乏重复研究让人质疑原始研究结果的可靠性，以及心理科学的西方化状态让人质疑此类研究成果的普遍性。
