Christian words associated with prejudice in experiment

In a recent study conducted by Baylor University it was found that those who are given Christian religious words in writing or conversation are more likely to express racial prejudice and negative views toward African Americans.

Dr. Wade Rowatt, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor who led the study, looked at the results of the study which appeared in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science and said, "It could be that priming religious words activates cognitive representation of things like right-wing authoritism and a Protestant work ethic." The definition of priming is when an earlier stimulus affects a behavior or response to a later stimulus. For example, if given a list of words about furniture without the word table, given the first few letters, tab, would finish with the word table as opposed to those who aren't given a word table. The following words were some of the ones used, with college students primed with neutral and Christian concepts like "heaven" "faith" and "cross." Participants were given words on a computer screen and asked to categorize them following these "prime" words. Then they were given assessments with various measures to determine feelings toward African Americans. These measures evaluated whether certain social policy decisions would or would not be good for African Americans. Measures of religiousness and spirituality were also administered to obtain specific information to establish proper controls for the research. The conclusions were that those primed with Christian words were more apt to be prejudiced toward African Americans than those who were not primed, even when the research was controlled for pre-existing levels of spirituality.