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In the first set of studies, Mark Aveyard at the (American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates) tested Muslim students on their cheating behaviour.<\/p>\n

The students were asked to undertake a computer-based maths quiz. Unfortunately, the computer program had a bug, so that it would automatically show the answer after a few seconds had passed \u2013\u00a0 unless a key was pressed. They were alone in the room, so Aveyard had to rely on their honesty to press the key and so not see the answer.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/div>\n

This was all a set up, of course. In fact, Aveyard really wanted to see if religious priming would affect how honest the students were.<\/p>\n

What he found was that a priming task involving words (the subjects had to unscramble a sentence with either religious or secular meaning) had no effect on honesty.<\/p>\n

Then he tried something different. In a follow-up study (shown in the figure), Aveyard played the students an audio recording of a busy street before they took the maths test, asking them to count the number of car horns they heard.<\/p>\n

For half the students, the recording also had, in the background, the Islamic call to prayer (athan).<\/p>\n

Listening to the call to prayer dramatically increased honest, as shown in the figure.<\/p>\n

Why should a call to prayer work as a religious prime when a word task did not? One possible reason, Aveyard says, is that the religion and context matters. Maybe word primes work in the post-Christian West, but not in the Islamic Middle-East.<\/p>\n

In the next post, we\u2019ll take a closer look at that from a Western perspective<\/p>\n

$\"ResearchBlogging.org\"$ <\/a><\/span>
\nAveyard, M. (2014). A Call to Honesty: Extending Religious Priming of Moral Behavior to Middle Eastern Muslims PLoS ONE, 9<\/span> (7) DOI: 10.1371\/journal.pone.0099447<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

$\"Creative$ <\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"