About This Project

This study will examine the role of various relational framing repertoires (e.g., deictic and hierarchical responding) on the performance of American Protestant Christians on a test of implicit bias when the comparison group contains stimuli related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, the study seeks to detect religious implicit bias and implement interventions that alter how the target population responds to perceived opposing religious stimuli.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure is a behavior analytic tool for detecting implicit bias. Various biases are examined, but only one published study examined religious bias. Data on religious biases may help us understand its impact on groups and develop ways to better serve people of faith. Detection is important, but behaviorists are primarily concerned with interventions that improve socially significant behavior. Interventions derived from relational frame theory (e.g., deictic and hierarchical framing) may lead to simpler means of improving behavior through altered verbal repertoires. Currently, multiple language repertoires are taught at once, making it unclear which changed the behavior.

What is the significance of this project?

Religion is one of the oldest human institutions and it permeates all cultures. Explicit and implicit biases, language we've learned and can't unlearn, against another group interferes with our ability to work prosocially to produce positive outcomes for humanity at the individual, local, and global levels. Foundational work is needed to discover ways to help interested parties overcome barriers of which they may be unaware. By adding in new verbal repertoires that aid in perspective taking and categorization, these biases might be overcome. This study would be one of the first to look at religious implicit bias from a behavior analytic perspective and explore the effect of training core relational framing repertoires on participant performance on a measure of implicit bias.

What are the goals of the project?

Experiment 1 will utilize the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) to detect if participants engage in implicit bias against Latter-day Saints. Experiment 2 will use the IRAP as a pre and post test measure to determine the efficacy of a religious literacy exercise involving categorization. Should those findings be inconclusive, Experiment 3 will be conducted comparing Experiment 2's intervention with one that asks the participant to take the perspective of a Latter-day Saint. A control group will watch an unrelated video. Those three groups will be compared to see if any were more effective and significantly different from control group performance.