“I once was blind”: experimental manipulation of religious attitudes via choice blindness

Given ongoing debates about the nature and consequences of religious belief, effective procedures for experimentally controlling such beliefs are highly desirable. To date, however, there are few robust, replicable methods. Here, we show that the “choice blindness” paradigm can be leveraged to directly manipulate religious beliefs and attitudes in a way that avoids demand characteristics. Across three studies, a substantial portion of our participants were prepared to endorse and justify reversals of their originally indicated beliefs about questions such as the existence of life after death and whether religion is a force for good in the world. Moreover, our experimental manipulation had a large effect (d > 1) on subsequently measured religious attitudes, which moved in the manipulated direction. Religious participants were no less likely than their atheistic counterparts to detect manipulations of their attitudes. Our work introduces a powerful paradigm for the experimental control of religious beliefs, a paradigm that holds great promise for illuminating contentious topics in the psychology and cognitive science of religion.