Prior research, using correlational and self-report methodologies, suggests that religion and public welfare function as alternate security/insurance systems. Consequently, in countries with more expansive public welfare systems people report less religiosity. The present studies expand this field by utilizing experimental methodology and by replicating and extending two previous experiments in both a secular/welfare state context (Sweden) and a religious/nonwelfare state context (the United States). In the first set of experiments, we tested if cognitive access to religious and welfare-related mental schemas differ depending on context. We also tested whether previous findings indicating that people cognitively turn to religion when exposed to threat replicate and extend to the welfare system. In the second set of experiments, we tested whether religious and welfare reminders lead to increased risk taking in these contexts. Our findings show that participants in the secular/welfare state context had lower cognitive access to religious schemas and were less willing to take risks after religious reminders. However, our findings did not replicate those from previous studies; our participants did not have increased cognitive access to religion, nor public welfare, after threat primes. Similarly, our participants were generally not more prone to risk taking after reminders of religion (or public welfare), although such an effect was obtained specifically on high-religious participants. We conclude that cultural context is important to consider when studying psychological functions of religion, and we suggest that the failed replications may be due to cultural, contextual factors. Finally, religious reminders may have contradictory influences on risk taking.

中文翻译：

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宗教与福利国家——文化背景对宗教示意图和启动的重要性。

使用相关和自我报告方法的先前研究表明，宗教和公共福利作为替代安全/保险系统发挥作用。因此，在公共福利体系更广泛的国家，人们报告的宗教信仰较少。目前的研究通过利用实验方法以及在世俗/福利国家背景（瑞典）和宗教/非福利国家背景（美国）中复制和扩展先前的两个实验来扩展这一领域。在第一组实验中，我们测试了对宗教和福利相关心理图式的认知访问是否因上下文而异。我们还测试了先前表明人们在面临威胁时认知转向宗教的发现是否会复制并扩展到福利系统。在第二组实验中，我们测试了宗教和福利提醒是否会导致在这些情况下增加风险。我们的研究结果表明，世俗/福利国家背景下的参与者对宗教图式的认知访问能力较低，并且在宗教提醒后不太愿意冒险。然而，我们的发现并没有复制以前的研究。在威胁素数之后，我们的参与者没有增加对宗教或公共福利的认知途径。同样，我们的参与者在提醒宗教（或公共福利）后通常不会更倾向于冒险，尽管这种效果是专门针对高度宗教的参与者获得的。我们得出结论，在研究宗教的心理功能时，文化背景是重要的考虑因素，我们认为失败的复制可能是由于文化、语境因素。最后，宗教提醒可能对冒险行为产生相互矛盾的影响。