Folk Moral Objectivism & Religion

Moral objectivism is the philosophical belief that moral facts exist mind-independently, and moral statements are true if and only if they correspond to these facts. Most laypeople are moral pluralists, being intuitively drawn to moral objectivism in some cases and moral non-objectivism in others. Previous work has suggested a link between folk moral objectivism (FMO), moral objectivist intuitions in ordinary people, and some aspects of religiosity. However, the direction of causality is unclear: does religiosity encourage FMO, or are those with higher FMO drawn towards religion? To determine a causal link, Yilmaz & Bahçekapili (2015) and Sarkissian & Phelan (2019) implicitly primed participants with religious concepts, and found an increase in FMO compared to a control condition. Yet, the implicit priming paradigm has come under fire in recent years, and is considered to be an invalid experimental manipulation. Moreover, the self-report measures used to assess FMO have several issues, including unclear and ambiguous wordings, conflation with unintended concepts, and poor experimental realism. This present study is the first to use an explicit priming paradigm to test how priming religious concepts in ordinary individuals affects moral objectivist intuitions. We also use a new set of measures to avoid some of the validity concerns of previous studies. We predict that the religion prime group will show higher FMO than the control group, given the established connection between FMO and religion. If this is the case, we hope to use this paradigm and the set of measures to test further questions about religion, FMO, and other beliefs.