Risk-Taking and Religion Part 4

“We used a more targeted measure assessing the dimension of belief that we

predicted to be relevant to the current effect—attachment

security. Individuals who are more securely attached to

God perceive God as a better source of security and protection (Kirkpatrick & Shaver, 1992).
We predicted that participants who are reminded of their attachment to

God, rather than simply of the concept of God, should be

more willing to take risks only if they are securely attached to God.”

Procedure:

They reference the paper whence they obtained the 6-item measure (they do parenthetical citation and alphabetical works cited like a bunch of goddamn Philistines). You can read the paper here (relevant part on page 642), but I’ll be nice and post the items here. You’re welcome.
God seems impersonal to me.
God seems to have little or no interest in my personal problems.
God seems to have little or no interest in my personal affairs.
I have a warm relationship with God.

Reading a bit of the paper they linked to, I’m curious to know why thy chose it. Attachment theory is, as Wikipedia describes it, “a psychological model that attempts to describe the dynamics of long-term and short-term interpersonal relationships between humans.” It’s been around since the 60’s, and it’s been fairly a fairly influential set of theories, particularly in childhood development. But linking it with God is a fairly niche idea, and based on the citations, it looks like the pet theory of Kirkpatrick (or at least he is a major proponent), one of the authors of the study whence our fellows gathered their 6-item measure. Not to dismiss the work out of hand, but it is fairly obscure. I’ve read a fair amount of theology and I’ve never seen the name come up. I’d be interested to know how these guys found it, and why they picked it. It’s a massive failure of the genre of scientific writing that these things are not discussed. “There’s no need to discuss ideas and argue our points; everything in these journals is pure scientific fact!”

The cynic in me worries they picked this because it had a scale ready to go. No need to make your own, to test an original idea, to have to know your subject inside and out before launching an experiment that will be used to make pronouncements of fact.

Anyway, back to their experiment:

This way, one group was “primed” to think of God first.

They plugged in their numbers and got the following results:

So priming alone wasn’t terribly influential, nor was measure of attachment (which they apparently decided to call “God security”); together, though, priming and attachment had a decent association with declared likelihood of taking a risk they thought of.

So they zoom in a little on these results:

Here they take the people who have a relatively low or high “attachment” to God and look at their “willingness” (I assume by taking the mean rating) to take their self-decided risk, with low and high defined as being respectively less or greater than one standard deviation from the mean. On the low end, both primed and unprimed folks have a similar “willingness” to take their risk, around 3. Whereas on the high end, the primed group climbs up to about a 4, and the unprimed group slinks down to about a 2.

From this, they conclude that “reminders of God increased risk taking only when individuals perceived God to be a reliable source of protection.”

But is that a fair conclusion? I want to say in defense of this study that these are the first batches of numbers I’m not just guffawing at. Nonetheless, I think they are drawing conclusions that their data don’t necessarily imply.

Again, I have the same objection I did back in Study 1b: saying you’ll take a risk and actually taking it are two very different things.
Moreover, everything here is in relative terms more than absolute terms. Actual desire to take risks never hit over a mean of 4, or “neither likely nor unlikely to take the risk” in actual terms. High versus low attachment was determined only by deviation from the mean of their group, not by hitting any sort of number.
Additionally, having never seen attachment theories applied to theology, I’m not sure how amenable I am to embracing it as a reasonable means of interpreting this data. Just because they cite Kirkpatrick doesn’t mean I’m sold. And to an extent, that’s not their job, but on the other hand, it’s not my onus to just take them at their word.

There very much could be other effects at play. Perhaps the type of person to score relatively high attachment ratings is the type of person who picks easily doable risks when reminded about God compared to harder ones when they aren’t. That has to do with thought-patterns. And human thinking patterns are immensely complex. Any psychologist who would dismiss that as a confounding variable has absolutely no business calling themself a psychologist. And being business majors certainly doesn’t exculpate the authors from this. What they did not incontrovertibly show is that attachment is necessarily a measure of security and only security.