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The God Effect
- icky 19y ago> In the experimental condition, the researchers prompted thoughts of God using a well-established "priming" technique: participants, who again included both theists and atheists, first had to unscramble sentences containing words such as God, divine and sacred. > [...] > In a second study, the researchers had participants unscramble sentences containing words like civic, contract and police -- meant to evoke secular moral institutions. Conclusion: sentence-unscrambling induces generosity.
- cturner 19y ago> Norenzayan can only speculate about the significance: > "We need that common denominator that works for > everyone. When I was first reading this, I thought it would be cool to give the other person 6 and thereby give them warm fuzzies about the anonymous other person. And I still think this is cool. But I'm reading _Atlas Shrugged_ at the moment and have changed my decision to considering any outcome to be equally valid on the part of the person making the decision. Why? Because - if someone has $10, why should they be induced to leave any for someone else? The study is founded on the flawed assumption that it's a good thing for people to give their money away.