Does Our Perception Of God Influence Our Perception Of Subjectively "sinful" Behaviors?

The current study investigated the influence of different perceptions of God (i.e., loving vs. punishing) on participants' attitudes towards subjectively "sinful" behaviors. Participants in the current study were 158 undergraduate students from The University of Texas at Arlington. Participants were instructed to complete the sentence scrambling task (Srull & Wyer, 1979), which was intended to prime them with different images of God. Once they completed the priming task, each participant filled out a questionnaire, which assessed their attitudes towards subjectively "immoral" behaviors. The results showed that regardless of the valence in each sentence, participants who were primed with the presence of God reported less prejudiced attitudes than those who were primed with sentences that excluded the presence of another figure. It was further discovered that participants with a loving baseline image of God were more intolerant of those same behaviors. Potential explanations for this paradoxical set of findings are discussed.