{"id":361,"date":"2009-09-08T22:30:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-08T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/09\/a-prayer-a-day-to-make-you-grateful.html"},"modified":"2014-11-13T18:04:50","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T17:04:50","slug":"prayer-day-to-make-you-grateful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/09\/prayer-day-to-make-you-grateful.html","title":{"rendered":"A prayer a day to make you grateful"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

People who pray more are also often more grateful about, well, stuff. For instance, they\u2019re more likely to agree that \u201cI have so much in life to be grateful for\u201d (here\u2019s a Gratitude Scale<\/a>, with six other similar questions).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing, though. Is it the prayer that makes people grateful, or is it just that people who are grateful are more likely to pray?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a classic problem, and the only way to really sort it out is to do an \u2018interventional\u2019 study. That\u2019s one in which you take a group of people, put half on one \u2018treatment\u2019 and the other half on another, and see what happens.<\/p>\n

Studies like this are pretty rare in sociology, for practical reasons, but that\u2019s exactly what Nathaniel Lambert and colleagues from Florida State University have done.<\/p>\n

They took a group of about 100 students, almost all women and all of them in a current romantic relationship, and put them in four different groups. The first two groups were asked to pray daily, and the second two were asked to do a task unrelated to prayer. Here\u2019s the details of the groups:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Pray daily for the well-being of your partner<\/li>\n
  2. Pray daily (with no specific instructions)<\/li>\n
  3. Report daily on their activities for the day<\/li>\n
  4. Think positive thoughts about their partner<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Then they assessed all the participants for their level of gratitude. It seems (although the paper doesn\u2019t spell it out) that there weren\u2019t any statistically significant differences.<\/p>\n

    So they lumped together the two \u2018prayer\u2019 groups and the two other groups. That has the effect of increasing the statistical power.<\/p>\n

    Doing this comparison, they found a significant difference. Those students who were asked to pray daily did become more grateful.<\/p>\n

    This is a great study simply because it is interventional. What\u2019s more, they controlled for \u2018social desirability\u2019 \u2013 the tendency for some people to tell you what they think you want to hear. So it\u2019s good evidence of genuine cause and effect. But there are a few problems with it that need to be remembered.<\/p>\n

    Firstly, they excluded all the non-religious people \u2013 in other words all though who said they rarely or never prayed. That amounted to about 25% of potential participants. So this is a study of the effect of prayer in people who already see some benefit to it, but who just don\u2019t get around to it as often as they might.<\/p>\n

    Second, the effect is pretty small \u2013 about 1.6 units on a scale that stretches up to 42. The effect might be statistically significant, but that\u2019s not the same as saying it\u2019s important (Olivier Morin has written about this recently<\/a> over on ICCI blog). Without the authors putting the results into context of other factors that affect gratitude, it\u2019s hard to judge.<\/p>\n

    And third, the after-the-fact lumping together of groups because they didn\u2019t see the result they expected is a little bit dodgy (although much worse goes on regularly, it has to be said).<\/p>\n

    But despite these caveats, this is a good study. However, it leaves open the question of why prayer should increase gratitude. Mike McCullough<\/a>, at the University of Miami, put forward some potential reasons in a 2002 paper:<\/p>\n