November 4, 2010
PURITAN NATION:
Puritan Values Still Resonate in Today’s USA: A new study finds the value system of the early colonists, which links hard work, conservative sexual behavior and spiritual salvation, still has a hold on Americans’ psyches. (Tom Jacobs, 11/03/10, Miller-McCune)
The Puritans’ value system remains lodged deep in our psyches, shaping our emotions, judgments and behaviors. And its effects can be seen regardless of one’s political orientation or religious affiliation.That’s the conclusion of a group of researchers led by Eric Luis Uhlmann of the HEC Paris School of Management. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the scholars — including Yale University psychologist John Bargh — present evidence of “an overarching American ethos” binding work, sex and salvation.
They describe a series of studies backing up this notion, including one that compares our implicit attitudes with those of our northern neighbors. It was conducted by questioning people passing through public parks in the state of New York and the Canadian province of Ontario.
Participants (108 Americans and 207 Canadians) began the experiment by unscrambling a sentence. For half of those in each nation, the sentence was heavily weighted with salvation-related words such as “heaven,” “redeem” and “righteous.”
All then performed an anagram task, in which they were asked to make as many four or more letter words as they could out of four different words. Previous research has found this assignment is a good measure of one’s willingness to work; the more mental effort you put into the task, the more words you come up with.
The results: “American participants, but not Canadian participants, worked harder when they were primed with salvation,” the researchers report. Americans who had unscrambled the sentences containing religion-related terms “solved more anagrams than did participants in the neutral prime condition. In contrast, no priming effect was found for Canadian participants.”
Importantly, Uhlmann and his colleagues found the participants’ affiliation with any specific religion did not significantly impact the results. The mental link between salvation and hard work appears to be transmitted through the culture rather than any particular church or denomination.
Sure, those Canucks are cold now but they'll be plenty warm in Hell.
