Most religious primes in psychology were never tested to see if they really make people think of God.

Hiding religious words inside an ordinary CAPTCHA task primed religious thoughts without raising suspicion.

Religious thoughts became easier to access, but generosity in a money-sharing game did not change.

You have done it hundreds of times. A grid of blurry squares appears; you click the ones with traffic lights, and you move on. Nobody has ever asked what was going through your mind while you proved you were not a robot.

In a paper just published in Behavior Research Methods, my colleagues and I used that same task to bring religious ideas to people's minds. Then we checked whether it actually worked.

An old question with a hidden problem

For about 20 years, psychologists have been asking whether reminding people of God makes them more honest or generous. In his 2013 book Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan argued that belief in a god who watches and punishes helped strangers cooperate once societies grew too large for neighbors to monitor each other. Dominic Johnson had been making a related case since 2004, with more weight on the fear of punishment than on being watched, a point he later expanded in his book God Is Watching You. If either version is right, even a short reminder of God should change behavior in the lab.

The problem is the reminder itself. In implicit priming, participants unscramble sentences containing words like “divine” or “spirit,” in the hope that religious thoughts become active without anyone noticing. These primes are often too weak to demonstrate activation. In explicit priming, participants write a few sentences about God. This works, but many participants can guess what the study is about, and some then behave the way they think a good person should.

The findings have been messy as a result. A 2016 meta-analysis by Azim Shariff and his colleagues concluded that religious priming increases prosocial behavior. But when Michiel van Elk and his colleagues reanalyzed the same data in 2015, two different bias-correction methods yielded different answers: One suggested the entire effect could be explained by publication bias; the other suggested a real effect remained. Their conclusion was that meta-analysis alone cannot settle the question, and that only large, preregistered studies can. A 2024 meta-analysis by Shariff's research group added another........

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