Explaining Life-Altering Occurrences: A Test of the 'God-of-the-Gaps' Hypothesis

This experiment extends the growing literature aimed at identifying the conditions that impel people to make religious attributions. A total of 177 subjects were presented a series of 16 vignettes after each of which they provided an attributional analysis. The event depicted in each vignette was either (a) an action or occurrence having (b) a positive or negative outcome that was (c) life-altering or non-life-altering. Subjects selected their attributions from a menu that included religious causal agents (God, Satan), several naturalistic causes (e.g., the protagonist's characteristics, other actors), and nonreligious-supernaturalistic causes (fate, luck). As predicted, attributions to God were most commonly made when the event was a life-altering occurrence having positive consequences. Attributions to Satan, rarely made, were prompted by life-altering events having negative consequences. As for whether subjects exhibited a God-of-the-gaps pattern of causal reasoning, the evidence was mixed but tended to support the conclusion that they did not.