Abstract

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)237-283
JournalReligion, Brain and Behavior
Volume13
Issue number3
Early online date5 Jul 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Funding

Neil Levy and Robert M. Ross were supported by Australian Research Council (grant number DP180102384); Ryan McKay was supported by Cogito Foundation [grant number R10917]; Sacha Altay was supported by French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (reference 17-EURE-0017 FrontCog and 10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL); Emily Gerdin was supported by National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GR100544) [grant number DGE-2139841]; Eric-Jan Wagenmakers was supported by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [grant number 016.Vici.170.083]; Don van Ravenzwaaij was supported by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [grant number 016.Vidi.188.001]; Alexandra Sarafoglou was supported by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [grant number 406-17-568]; Michiel van Elk was supported by John Templeton Foundation [grant number 60663]; James O. Pawelski and Louis Tay were supported by Templeton Religion Trust (TRT 0154). Marcel R. Schreiner, Susanne Frick, Julian Quevedo Putter and Marcel C. Schmitt were supported by the German Research Foundation [grant number GRK 2277].

Keywords

  • Health
  • many analysts
  • open science
  • religion

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