Effects of regulatory focus on endorsement of religious beliefs

Regulatory focus has an impact on different judgments. Specifically, promotion focus is directed at achieving positive outcome whereas prevention focus is directed at preventing negative outcomes. Thus, people in promotion focus endorse positive outcome-framed messages whereas people in prevention focus endorse negative outcome-framed messages. In two experiments, we examined whether this holds true for religious beliefs. In Experiment 1, participants were undergraduate students; we found the expected interaction between regulatory focus and verse frame. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with participants from conservative Lutheran communities, demonstrating that there was a transient influence of induced regulatory focus. This finding suggests that regulatory focus either is difficult to discount or is not a peripheral cue that is used in heuristic processing only, but an internal state that has a pervasive impact even if people are highly motivated to process information systematically.