Do Religious Primes Increase Risk Taking? Evidence Against “Anticipating Divine Protection” in Two Preregistered Direct Replications

Do reminders of God encourage people to take more risks? A recent paper (Kupor, Laurin, & Levav, 2015) reported 9 studies that all yielded statistically significant results consistent with hypothesis. We conducted two large-sample preregistered direct replications (total N = 1104) of studies in this paper (Studies 1a and 1b), and evaluated replicability via 1) statistical significance, 2) a “small telescopes” approach (Simonsohn, 2015), 3) Bayes factors (Gronau, Ly, & Wagenmakers, 2017), and 4) meta-analyses pooling across original and replication studies. None of these approaches found replicable effects. Combining both original studies and both replications yields 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 increase nonmoral risk taking in these designs. This suggests that support for the “anticipating divine protection” hypothesis may be overstated. Preprint https://psyarxiv.com/8f7qd/