Dr. Larisa Heiphetz on “In the name of God: How children and adults judge agents who act for religious versus secular reasons.”

Psychological Research Stories

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Larisa Heiphetz, who is a researcher at Columbia University. Her research interests include the development of social preferences, religious cognition, moral cognition, and judgments of the criminal justice system. The focus of the interview was an article published in cognition, titled “In the name of God: How children and adults judge agents who act for religious versus secular reasons.” The abstract for the article is provided below for your convenience. To share comments or questions, please share them in the comment section below, or send me a message by going to methodologyforpsychology.org/contact. Thank you for listening.

Mentioned Resources

The Chosen – Chaim Potok

The Spiritual Life of Children – Robert Coles

The Formation of Belief-Based Social Preferences

Abstract

“Many people are guided by religious beliefs, but judgments of religiously and secularly motivated individuals remain unclear. We investigated reasoning about religiously versus secularly motivated characters among 5- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Study 1, theist and non-theist children reported similar attitudes toward theists; however, large differences emerged between theist and non-theist adults. Study 2 obtained similar results using a continuous, rather than forced choice, measure of preference. Additionally, Studies 2–3 tested two explanations for the stronger influence of religious background on adults’ versus children’s responses. Study 2 did not find strong evidence for the theistic majority account, which posits that the greater perceived prevalence of theists as compared with non-theists influenced children’s responses more than adults’ responses. The results of Study 3 were consistent with the intuition account, which argues that non-theist adults had effortfully overridden the teleological intuitions that may have influenced children’s responses in Studies 1–2 and potentially led children to prefer characters whose beliefs were in line with children’s own intuitions. The degree to which teleological intuitions persisted implicitly among adults predicted those adults’ pro-theist preferences. These findings offer connections between religious judgments and other areas of social cognition, such as social preferences and teleology.”

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