Priming by environmental cues study
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Recent studies show the effect of priming by religious concepts (Shariff and Norenzayan 2007) and the effect of environmental cues on the honesty and prosocial behavior (Haley and Fessler 2005, Bateson et al. 2006). More importantly, Xygalatas et al. (in press) show how religious material environment shapes our cooperation and sense for prosociality. Authors encourage future research to investigate proximate mechanisms by which religious ecologies evoke prosocial response. Religious environments are often populated by statues and icons of saints and by other anthropomorphic depictions. We can speculate that these statues may, to certain extent, be responsible for the effect these environments has on our behavior. Marcel (1983: 7) argues that visual stimuli can activate structurally related and associated representations in their respective representational domains. Developmental psychology suggests that depictions of faces with eyes are relatively more attractive than other facial components (Maurer 1985). Eyes are important cues revealing the intentions of the other. Vision is the main sensory component in what Baron-Cohen (1995: 38-40) calls Eye Direction Detector (EDD). This mechanism allows to predict the behavior of others and to synchronize the collective activity. Capacity develops already early in the childhood to be a vital part of the joint-attention mechanism (Tomasello 1999). The mechanisms responsible for detecting the presence of others were found also on neural level (Saxe 2006). The proposed experiment may contribute to understanding of this problem in two ways. First, the experimental treatment comes in two conditions and author want to argue that it is not the presence of face with eyes only but their supposedly communicative character that is being imposed on participant. Second, I aim to explore the material quality of experimental treatment. |
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