We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion.
We didn’t find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you.
I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it was either from us or GWWC. With regards to religion, if it is in scripture or communicated by a religious figure (such as a rabbi or a priest), maybe it holds more weight? Also, the norms regarding giving are different to secular norms.
We didn’t measure how convinced they were by the argument (in hindsight we probably should have), but we did ask how obligated they felt and obligations ratings were significantly higher in the Moral Argument treatment than the control. That correlation may be explained by finding the argument more convincing, but we don’t have any concrete evidence (from this study) to strongly update our beliefs.
Thanks Ariel. That’s a great question.
We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion.
We didn’t find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you.
I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it was either from us or GWWC. With regards to religion, if it is in scripture or communicated by a religious figure (such as a rabbi or a priest), maybe it holds more weight? Also, the norms regarding giving are different to secular norms.
We didn’t measure how convinced they were by the argument (in hindsight we probably should have), but we did ask how obligated they felt and obligations ratings were significantly higher in the Moral Argument treatment than the control. That correlation may be explained by finding the argument more convincing, but we don’t have any concrete evidence (from this study) to strongly update our beliefs.