Beyond Mere Compliance to Authoritative Figures: Religious Priming Increases Conformity to Informational Influence Among Submissive People

Religious priming activates submissive thoughts and facilitates compliance to authority's request for revenge among individuals with high dispositional submissiveness (Saroglou, Corneille, & Van Cappellen, 2009 Saroglou, V., Corneille, O. and Van Cappellen, P. 2009. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening: Religious priming activates submissive thoughts and behaviors. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 19: 143–154. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The present experiment examines another key social influence issue: the effect of religious priming on informational conformity. Participants primed with subtle religious or control cues were asked to complete a numeric estimation task. In this task, they were left free to use or disregard numeric estimates allegedly provided by peers for reporting their own numeric decision. Results revealed that participants assimilated their estimates to that of their peers more after religious than control priming, at least for participants scoring higher on dispositional submissiveness. This finding adds to current research concerned with the impact of religious priming in social cognition and behavior.