THE RELIGIOUS BOGUS PIPELINE:

1. THE RELIGIOUS BOGUS PIPELINE: Religious Convictions may not Differ When Honesty is Ostensibly Monitored Brock Brothers, Stacy Memering& Jennifer Vonk, Oakland University • Introduction • We explored whether individuals hold on to their extraordinary religious convictions even when they think their level of honesty can be detected. To implement this monitoring effect, we utilized a procedure known as the Bogus Pipeline (Sigall, 1971) where participants are connected to a polygraph machine but, in fact, their physiological responses are unknowingly unmonitored. This procedure has been known to influence the genuineness of participants’ responses in many experiments across a wide array of topics (Alexander & Fisher, 2003; Kassin, Fein & Markus, 2008; Roese & Jamieson, 1993). We hypothesize that participants’ religious convictions will be significantly weakened when they feel their honesty is being monitored compared to when it is not. This study will contribute to our understanding of the formation and representation of our beliefs under the observation of third party perspectives and other social influences. • Results • Participants’ strength of religious beliefs were calculated by summing their responses to the True Belief Questionnaire before and during the laboratory procedure for both the experimental and control group.Average strength of beliefs (before and during) for both groups are shown below: • Discussion • There appear to be no significant differences between participants’ religious convictions before or during the bogus pipeline procedure for either the control group or the experimental group. This result suggests that participants’ fundamental religious convictions remain consistent even under the deception of lie detection. Our testing is ongoing and future studies will investigate changes in anti-religious beliefs as well as religious beliefs and should include individuals of religious faiths other than Christianity. • Contact: bbrothe2@oakland.edu • Suggested Reading • Jones, E. & Sigall, H. (1971). The Bogus Pipeline: A new paradigm for measuring affect and attitude. Psychological Bulletin, 765, 349–364. • Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H.R. (2008). Social Psychology (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin • Alexander, M. G. & Fisher, T. D. (2003). Truth and consequences: Using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality. The Journal of Sex Research, 40. • Roese, N.J. & Jamieson, D.W. (1993). Twenty years of bogus pipeline research: A critical review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 363–375. • Methodology/procedure • 22 Christian or Catholic participants (undergraduate students) completed an online survey consisting of 59 items in a five-point Likert format (highly agree/disagree) where they rated their agreeableness of blunt statements regarding their fundamental religious faith (e.g. “There really existed a man named Adam and his partner Eve, from which we have all descended”). Later, they completed the same survey in a lab setting where they were connected to a polygraph under the assumption that their lies could be detected. The participants read the items from a PowerPoint timed slide and verbally stated their answer to the researcher who recorded it while acting as if the polygraph was responsive to the participant’s answers. To account for possible changes in responses over time not due to the lie detector, half of the participants (11) were in a control condition where they followed the same procedure connected to the polygraph but were advised that it was turned off. Afterwards, the participants were debriefed regarding the deception used.