A call to honesty: extending religious priming of moral behavior to Middle Eastern Muslims.

ABSTRACT: 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 th

SUBMITTER: Aveyard ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4084630 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature