Abstract
People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers’ worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. In a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (N = 10,195 from 24 countries), we presented participants with obscure, meaningless statements attributed to either a spiritual guru or a scientist. We found a robust global source credibility effect for scientific authorities, which we dub ‘the Einstein effect’: across all 24 countries and all levels of religiosity, scientists held greater authority than spiritual gurus. In addition, individual religiosity predicted a weaker relative preference for the statement from the scientist compared with the spiritual guru, and was more strongly associated with credibility judgements for the guru than the scientist. Independent data on explicit trust ratings across 143 countries mirrored our experimental findings. These findings suggest that irrespective of one’s religious worldview, across cultures science is a powerful and universal heuristic that signals the reliability of information.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 523-535 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Nature Human Behaviour |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by funds from the Templeton Foundation (grant number 60663) to M.v.E., the Cogito Foundation (grant number R10917) to R.Mc.K., the Australian Research Council (grant number DP180102384) to N.L. and R.M.R., Templeton Religion Trust (reference TRT0196) to J.A.B., and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (reference 17-EURE-0017 FrontCog and 10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL) to S.A. The analysis was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Cooperative.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by funds from the Templeton Foundation (grant number 60663) to M.v.E., the Cogito Foundation (grant number R10917) to R.Mc.K., the Australian Research Council (grant number DP180102384) to N.L. and R.M.R., Templeton Religion Trust (reference TRT0196) to J.A.B., and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (reference 17-EURE-0017 FrontCog and 10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL) to S.A. The analysis was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Cooperative.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Behavioral Neuroscience