When and why does belief in a controlling God strengthen goal commitment?
Introduction
Religion is central to the lives of individuals and societies. Eighty-five percent of people worldwide subscribe to a formalized religion (Zuckerman, 2005) and the large majority of Americans believe in God (Gallup Poll, 2008), even by conservative estimates (Gervais & Najle, 2017). It is for good reason, then, that psychologists are increasingly interested in religion's impact on psychological functioning (Pargament, 2013). This work has deepened our understanding of social behavior and shed new light on basic psychological processes (Barrett, 2000, Norenzayan and Gervais, 2013, Waytz et al., 2010).
Within this scope lie important questions about when and why belief in supernatural causation affects self-regulation–the processes through which one alters responses or behavior in a goal-directed manner (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). Does believing that God controls one's life support everyday goal pursuit? Or does it inhibit motivation or simply not make a difference?
Prior theory offers conflicting answers. Classic theorists (Durkheim, 1954, James, 2002) and contemporary researchers (McGregor et al., 2010, Soenke et al., 2013) contend that belief in divine control supports goal pursuit by assuaging anxiety and feelings of uncertainty. Yet, other theorists claim that believing in God's intervention causes people to relinquish autonomous control over their life to a higher power, thus stifling individual ambition (Freud, 1961, Rothbaum et al., 1982).
Empirical evidence is scarce and paints a similarly murky picture. On the one hand, studies show that religiosity is positively associated with temptation resistance and self-control (Koole et al., 2010, McCullough and Willoughby, 2009). Also, neurophysiological evidence shows that greater belief in God is marked by reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex—a cortical alarm system triggered by the detection of error and the experience of uncertainty—and hence may signal confident goal-directed action (Inzlicht, McGregor, Hirsh, & Nash, 2009). On the other hand, perceiving God as in control can have no impact and even deflate motivation. In one set of studies, participants experimentally reminded of a controlling God became less willing to expend effort or make sacrifices to pursue long-term goals (Laurin, Kay, & Fitzsimons, 2012).
The question remains when (and why) belief in God's control does and does not help people engage in such everyday goals as eating healthier and advancing their career.
Recent insights into the beliefs that underpin goal pursuit are useful here. Building on prior theory (Jost and Banaji, 1994, Lerner, 1980), Compensatory Control Theory (CCT) posits that people's confidence they are in control of their lives rests on a view of the external world as structured as opposed to disordered (Kay et al., 2008, Landau et al., 2015). This view is sustained by a broad network of beliefs that includes perceived regularities in the properties of stimuli and the time course of events. Believing that their social and physical environments are sufficiently structured, people can confidently predict the consequences of action, and are therefore likely to exploit that structure to pursue goals. If, in contrast, predictable structure seems lacking—for example, if stimuli appear difficult to place into dependable causal relations—then people lose confidence in their ability to achieve their goals. In short, CCT posits that beliefs implying a predictably structured world are cornerstones of the cognitive infrastructure underlying a confident sense of personal control.
This perspective yields the hypothesis that activating sources of predictable structure, in particular, will increase perceived personal control, even when those sources are superficially unrelated to the domain in which control is assessed. Supporting studies show that people feel more in control if given the opportunity to attribute seemingly random hazards and risks in their lives to the machinations of a cunning enemy—an effect mediated by reduced perceptions of randomness in the environment (Sullivan, Landau & Rothschild, 2010). Converging findings in organizational contexts show that priming people to view their workplace as characterized by a specifically predictable hierarchy increased self-reported control (Friesen, Kay, Eibach, & Galinsky, 2014).
A related hypothesis is that activating sources of predictable structure will promote commitment to personal goals. Supporting studies show that exposure to subtle reminders of orderly patterns in the natural environment made people more willing and likely to take action to pursue long-term goals (Kay, Laurin, Fitzsimons, & Landau, 2014). For example, priming predictable patterns in the placement of leaves on trees, or stars in the night sky, increased effortful pursuit of goals that bore no superficial relation to those patterns. Other research finds that subtly introducing disorder in the physical environment, in this case with askew wall décor and desktop clutter, undermined participants' ability to regulate their behavior (Chae & Zhu, 2014). Likewise, portraying corporations as agents that will intervene in people's lives in predictable ways buffered the loss of motivation that normally occurs when a salient goal seems overly demanding (Khenfer, Laurin, Tafani, Roux, & Kay, 2017). Attesting to the unique role of predictability, this effect disappeared when corporations were portrayed as benevolent but not capable of predictably influencing one's life. Collectively, these prior findings suggest that affirming sources of structure offering little predictability will not encourage goal pursuit.
Applying evidence of predictability's motivating impact to the current question, we observe that popular conceptions of God's control differ in their implications for predictability. Acknowledging these differences may be crucial for understanding when and why religious beliefs affect goal pursuit. Indeed, other relevant studies show that activating and measuring different conceptions of God's control (e.g., omniscient vs. omnipotent) predict unique downstream effects on self-regulation (Laurin, Kay, et al., 2012).
One popular conception portrays God as a consistent implementer of rules who intervenes in worldly affairs according to a formal system of moral principles and codes, such as need and merit, that humans can understand (e.g., Psalm 33:11 “But the plans of the LORD stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations”). This conception implies that, by virtue of God's transparent control, one's environment is not only structured but also predictable—a place where goal-directed actions are likely to produce desired outcomes. Thus, based on CCT, we hypothesized that belief in and exposure to this conception of God's control would strengthen commitment to personal goals.
Another popular but contrasting conception emphasizes a mysterious mode of divine causation, epitomized in the common expression “God works in mysterious ways” and reiterated throughout religious texts (Romans 11:33 “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!”). In this conception, God effects change in the world according to rules, codes, and plans that are unknowable by humans. This implies an unpredictable world in which one continually confronts events and circumstances that appear unjust, random, and even absurd.
It is notable that construing supernatural intervention as inherently mysterious has captivated people across cultures and historical eras (Howard-Snyder & Moser, 2002). What is the appeal? One answer is that it solves the problem of theodicy, reconciling God's alleged benevolence and omnipotence with the reality of evil and misfortune (Berger, 1967, Sullivan, 2016). It implies that seemingly undeserved suffering and arbitrary tragedies (e.g., genocides, natural disasters) are all part of God's broader, benevolent plan. It is futile to question His motives because they are unknowable.
The utility of this perceived unpredictability is evidenced in how people prefer to characterize other humans' influence on their lives. Sullivan et al. (2010) showed that people preferred to see personal enemies as having vague, mysterious abilities and motives (vs. explicitly known powers) because that conception enables them to attribute a wide range of seemingly random outcomes to a single source of control. These findings suggest that conceiving of God's control as profoundly mysterious helps people make sense of why bad things happen to good people.
The “mysterious ways” conception may also support faith in the efficacy of petitionary prayer and the existence of God. For example, approximately 40% of Americans solicit God to improve their health (e.g., being cured from disease; Barnes, Powell-Griner, McFann, & Nahin, 2004). Those who believe God intervenes in a straightforward, transparent manner will be repeatedly disappointed when their requests appear to go unanswered or denied (disease persists or worsens). Believing in a mysterious mode of supernatural causation is more accommodating, allowing for the possibility that an apparently unanswered prayer may be approved on a secret timetable or denied for a good reason that cannot be fathomed (Barrett, 2001, Barrett, 2004, Boudry and Braeckman, 2012, Boudry and De Smedt, 2011, Humphrey, 1995). In this view, failed prayers rarely call God's benevolent control into question, creating the type of unfalsifiable ideology that many people find compelling and consoling (Friesen, Campbell, & Kay, 2015).
Complementing these insights, CCT suggests that, despite its other benefits, construing God's control as mysterious is unlikely to support goal pursuit. Believing that God could intervene at any moment for unknowable and seemingly absurd purposes casts doubt on any reliable link between current goal-directed action and future outcomes. Based on this analysis, we hypothesized that belief in and exposure to this conception would not increase goal commitment, and may decrease it.
Indirect support for this hypothesis comes from evidence for the specific importance of predictability in the appeal of structure. Tullett, Kay, and Inzlicht (2014) showed that reminders of order (vs. randomness) decreased self-reported anxiety and performance monitoring, but not if the order was described as beyond comprehension. Still, these prior studies did not focus on the potential impact of priming different conceptions of God's control.
In sum, viewing God as controlling one's life may not be enough to help people pursue their goals. Based on CCT, we proposed that a key difference lies in how people represent God's modus operandi. People will commit to their goals particularly when God seems to govern the world according to a transparent program, therefore lending predictable structure to the environment in which they pursue goals in their daily life.
To clarify, we do not claim that divinely-sourced predictability is more motivating than other sources of predictability. As we just saw, the empirical basis for our hypotheses is evidence that goal pursuit benefits from activating predictable (vs. unpredictable) structure sourced in diverse systems, ranging from arboreal patterns to workplace hierarchy. CCT does not make strong claims about the comparative impact of these sources.
However, other lines of work suggest that God-sourced predictability is particularly motivating. Compared to secular influences, God is commonly construed as an agent with human-like intentions and beliefs. Recent work on anthropomorphism (Epley et al., 2007, Waytz et al., 2010) shows that people have an easier time comprehending agentic action than the cumulative influence of manifold, impersonal forces. For example, people were particularly likely to deploy psychological explanations for unpredictable computers, ostensibly because the attribution of mental states afforded a degree of coherence and predictability. Perceiving predictable order as created intentionally—because God wants it there—may portray it as more dependable as a basis for goal-directed action. In light of these findings, we designed one of the current studies to compare the effects of priming divine versus secular sources of predictability on goal commitment. Although this comparison was not the focus of the project, findings stand to inspire further research.
Study 1 takes an individual differences approach to test whether the association between belief in God and goal commitment is moderated by the belief that God's intervention is predictable. We predict that, at high levels of belief in God's control, greater belief in God's predictability will correlate positively with goal commitment, whereas belief that God intervenes unpredictably will attenuate, and possibly reverse, this relation.
Studies 2 to 5 aim to establish causality by manipulating exposure to portrayals of God as controlling in either a predictable or a mysterious manner.
Study 5 also compares the effects of priming God's predictable control with priming secular sources of predictable order. This enabled us to test whether portraying God as predictably controlling impacts goal pursuit in a way that is not reducible to portraying the world as generally predictable (again, we view this as an open question).
We pursued both internal validity and generalizability by including critical comparison conditions, converging operations (e.g., diversified primes), and samples recruited from online and undergraduate populations. Studies span a range of real-world goal contexts. Studies 1 to 3 focused on commitment to a financial savings goal—a desirable end-state for which actions are specifically dedicated toward longer term rewards over short-term gains (Chapman & Elstein, 1995). Studies 4 and 5 focused on academic and health-related goals, respectively, and included behavioral measures of goal commitment.
Study 6 presents a meta-analysis to summarize and quantify the effects of God's predictability across the five previous studies.
For all studies, we report all participants, all conditions included in the study, and all relevant independent and dependent measures. We conducted each study in a single wave (i.e., no additional participants were added after analyses) and analyzed data only after the required sample size target was met (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). All studies were approved by the applicable university's Institutional Review Board.
Finally, we began looking at the process through which predictable divine control supports goal pursuit. CCT does not specifically identify mediators of activated sources of predictable order, focusing instead on predictability's unique impact. Accordingly, research inspired by CCT does not favor one mediating process over another. Hence, the approach taken here was to catalyze future attention to this question by exploring three potential mediators suggested by prior work:
This refers to the belief that one's actions can reliably produce, either directly or indirectly, desired outcomes for the self (Bandura, 2001). Decades of research spanning such diverse goals as smoking cessation and academic achievement show that self-efficacy fluctuates in response to situational factors and predicts goal pursuit independent of external task demands (e.g., Multon et al., 1991, Stajkovic and Luthans, 1998).
It is possible that construing God as enforcing predictable contingencies between circumstances, events, and outcomes increases people's confidence in their own ability to undertake goal-directed action. By contrast, believing that God mysteriously pulls the strings of one's life may not support self-efficacy. We tested this possibility by assessing whether activating predictable (vs. unpredictable) divine control increased goal commitment by means of strengthening the perception that one is capable of effective action in the domains of personal finances (Study 3) and health (Study 5).
This refers to confidence that a given action will bring about a specific outcome. It is related to, but distinct from, self-efficacy (Cameron et al., 2012, Landau et al., 2015). For instance, people discriminate between believing they are capable of carefully saving money (self-efficacy) and believing that careful saving generally improves financial outcomes (response efficacy). Lacking confidence that a given action produces effective results, people may not be sufficiently motivated to undertake it, even if they trust their ability to do so. To test the possibility that priming a predictably (vs. unpredictably) controlling God fosters goal commitment by means of strengthening response efficacy, we measured the perceived efficacy of specific goal-directed actions in the domains of academic achievement (Study 4) and health (Study 5).
A third possibility is that the predictability of God's control may enhance goal pursuit merely by suggesting that the individual shares responsibility with God. Classic theorizing on personal control (Rothbaum et al., 1982) recognizes that an individual may feel greater control over outcomes in some circumstances by relying on the vicarious control afforded by a powerful external entity, such as God or a powerful group. However, this perspective argues for increased feelings of agency not via a renewed commitment to pursuing goals in general, but by shifting one's goals to align with the goals of the more powerful agent. Accordingly, (the illusion of) agency occurs via aligning oneself with the powerful entity, affirming the feeling of self-other overlap, or otherwise enhancing its perceived power (Greenaway et al., 2015). This is an entirely different form of control restoration than we are interested in here, so we do not directly test this mechanism. Doing so would require testing shifts in identification as the crucial dependent measure or predictor variable and then the feelings of agency that may result. This type of effect is well researched, however, in recent work on the group-based control restoration model (Fritsche et al., 2013, Greenaway et al., 2015). It is conceivable, of course, that people prefer to align themselves with groups that are predictable rather than unpredictable, insofar as doing so affords various social identification benefits, but this question is better suited for research specifically investigating the link between identification processes and control. All that said, to test the alternative possibility that the predicted effect is not due to the type of control God exerts, as we theorize, but rather to perceiving a predictable (vs. unpredictable) God as simply having more control from which one can share, we measured belief in God's control over the relevant goal domain (Study 5).
Section snippets
Participants
American residents (N = 278, 70.1% female, Mage = 45.6) were recruited to participate in an online study using Toluna's participant database (Toluna is an international market research firm that collects online data for a per participant fee). Because there was no precedent for this correlational study, we sought a large sample, requesting data from the allotted maximum of 300 respondents and receiving 278. Data were collected in one wave and no additional participants were added after analyses.
Participants
Participants (N = 116) were recruited online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. They self-identified as Christian (30.2%), nonreligious (24.1%), atheist (19.0%), Hindu (19.0%), Muslim (4.3%), Buddhist (0.9%), and other (2.6%). We determined sample size by allocating 30 participants per cell provided that the non-atheist sample reached at least N = 100 when the wave of data collection was complete. Adopting procedures used in prior work (e.g., Inzlicht & Tullett, 2010), we excluded atheists from the
Study 3
Study 3 begins to examine mechanism, focusing on self-efficacy. We predicted that the effect of exposure to a predictable God portrayal on goal commitment would be partially mediated by confidence that one can take action to achieve desired outcomes.
Study 4
Study 4 tests whether the primary predicted effect emerges in a different context of goal engagement and when employing a dependent measure that is more personally relevant than the scales used in the previous studies. College students considered their goal to perform well on their next final exam before completing a planning exercise in which they apportioned time to preparing for that exam. Complementing Study 3's focus on the mediation of self-efficacy, Study 4 focused on the potential role
Study 5
Study 5 had five objectives. First, it compared the effects of divine versus secular sources of predictability within the same goal domain. This enabled us to test whether the predicted effect is uniquely caused by the salience of God's predictable control, or whether it stems from induced perceptions of predictability in general. Past research suggests that belief in God is particularly effective at satisfying needs for structure relative to secular sources because of God's unique features
Method
We conducted meta-analysis to summarize and quantify the support for our claim that beliefs in specifically predictable divine control increase goal-relevant confidence and commitment. For an initial meta-analysis of the effects of God's predictability, we included all relevant effect sizes, including those from the same sample, to assess overall evidence that predictability influences goal pursuit across a wide range of measures. We converted all relevant t values to a single effect size
General discussion
How, why, and when religious belief impacts self-regulation is an important question, but relevant empirical findings have been mixed. By focusing on a previously ignored dimension of belief in supernatural control—perceived predictability of divine influence—we sought to reconcile conflicting findings and refine emerging theoretical models of religion's psychological significance.
Five studies showed that viewing God as controlling worldly affairs can help people engage their personal goals,
Conclusion
The current studies help to illuminate the conditions under which God's perceived influence in daily life motivates personal goal pursuit. Resolving apparently contradicting views, we found that observing a controlling God motivates specifically when God is conceived as imposing predictable structure on the world, not when God is thought to intervene in mysterious ways. While we found overall evidence of that effect across domains, the work raises new questions about the processes through which
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