Priming Study Suggests Churches Make People More Insular

By Christopher Thielen on February 7, 2012

Tom Rees, writing for The Secular News Daily, highlights a priming study done by Jordan LaBouff of the University of Maine: he inquired about the participants’ feelings toward various groups of people both in front of a church and in front of civic (secular) buildings in both London and the Netherlands:

The mix of people was pretty typical for the area – 39% nonreligious, the rest Catholics and Protestants with a few religious minorities …

…

[A]ttitudes towards every single group were more hostile when people were asked outside a church. All the differences are statistically significant (except the difference in attitudes towards Christians).

This study needs to be reproduced and verified, of course, and does not take into account the differences in people who simply tend to go near churches vs civic buildings.

See the graph of responses at The Secular News Daily.