Recent studies have found that activating religious cognition by priming techniques can enhance prosocial behavior, arguably because religious concepts carry prosocial associations. But many of these studies have primed multiple concepts simultaneously related to the sacred. We argue here that religion and God are distinct concepts that activate distinct associations. In particular, we examine the effect of God and religion on prosociality toward the ingroup and outgroup. In three studies, we found that religion primes enhanced prosociality toward ingroup members, consistent with ingroup affiliation, whereas, God primes enhanced prosociality toward outgroup member, consistent with concerns of moral impression management. Implications for theory and methodology in religious cognition are discussed.

Historically, religion and religious belief have often been credited as the source of human morality. But what have been the real effects of religion on prosocial behavior? A review of the psychological literature reveals a complex relation between religious belief and moral action: leading to greater prosocial behavior in some contexts but not in others, and in some cases actually increasing antisocial behavior. In addition, different forms of religious belief are associated with different styles of co‐operation. This body of evidence paints a somewhat messy picture of religious prosociality; however, recent examinations of the cognitive mechanisms of belief help to resolve apparent inconsistencies. In this article, we review evidence of two separate sources of religious prosociality: a religious principle associated with the protection of the religious group, and a supernatural principle associated with the belief in God, or other supernatural agents. These two principles emphasize different prosocial goals, and so have different effects on prosocial behavior depending on the target and context. A re‐examination of the literature illustrates the independent influences of religious and supernatural principles on moral action.

In this research, the authors found that people use speed of movement to infer the presence of mind and mental attributes such as intention, consciousness, thought, and intelligence in other persons, animals, and objects. Participants in 4 studies exhibited timescale bias--perceiving human and nonhuman targets (animals, robots, and animations) as more likely to possess mental states when those targets moved at speeds similar to the speed of natural human movement, compared with when targets performed actions at speeds faster or slower than the speed of natural human movement.

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Three studies investigated how subliminally primed thoughts of an agent prior to action can affect ascriptions of authorship for that action. Participants competed against a computer program to remove words from a computer screen. Participants reported greater feelings of authorship when primed with first person singular pronouns, and lower feelings of authorship when primed with “computer.” We also investigated whether authorship feelings could be affected by priming subjects with a supernatural agent (i.e., God). Feelings of authorship decreased when participants were primed with God, but only among believers