This meta-analysis explores the long-standing and heavily debated question of whether religiosity is associated with prosocial and antisocial behavior at the individual level. In an analysis of 701 effects across 237 samples, encompassing 811,663 participants, a significant relationship of = .13 was found between religiosity and prosociality (and antisociality, which was treated as its inverse).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost humans believe in a god or gods, a belief that may promote prosociality toward coreligionists. A critical question is whether such enhanced prosociality is primarily parochial and confined to the religious ingroup or whether it extends to members of religious outgroups. To address this question, we conducted field and online experiments with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish adults in the Middle East, Fiji, and the United States ( = 4,753).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMeaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForward flow is a new measure that quantifies free thought and predicts creativity (Gray et al., 2019). In his comment, Rossiter (2020) raises some conceptual and measurement concerns about this measure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen the human mind is free to roam, its subjective experience is characterized by a continuously evolving stream of thought. Although there is a technique that captures people's streams of free thought-free association-its utility for scientific research is undermined by two open questions: (a) How can streams of thought be quantified? (b) Do such streams predict psychological phenomena? We resolve the first issue-quantification-by presenting a new metric, "forward flow," that uses latent semantic analysis to capture the semantic evolution of thoughts over time (i.e.
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