Do Religious Primes Increase Risk Taking? Evidence Against “Anticipating Divine Protection” in Two Preregistered Direct Replications of Kupor,Laurin,and Levav (2015)

Abstract

Do reminders of God encourage people to take more risks? Kupor, Laurin, and Levav (2015) reported nine studies that all yielded statistically significant results consistent with the hypothesis that they do. We conducted two large-sample Preregistered Direct Replications (N = 1,104) of studies in Kupor et al.’s article (Studies 1a and 1b) and evaluated replicability via (a) statistical significance, (b) a “small-telescopes” approach, (c) Bayes factors (BFs), and (d) meta-analyses pooled across original and replication studies. None of these approaches replicated the original studies’ effects. Combining both original studies and both replications yielded strong evidence in support of the null over a default alternative hypothesis, BF₀₁ = 11.04, meaning that the totality of evidence speaks against the possibility that religious primes increased nonmoral risk taking in these designs. This suggests that support for the “anticipating-divine-protection” hypothesis may be overstated.