Mood, expertise, and
analogy:
implications for
religious transmission
Yvan I.
1–3
Russell
Box 1: Five-disc Tower of Hanoi (TOH) game
The optimal solution to the five-disc TOH
game has 31 moves. The aim of the game is
to move all of the discs from the leftmost peg
to the rightmost peg. The two important rules
are: (1) a larger disc cannot be placed upon a
smaller disc, and (2) only one disc may be
moved at a time.
Start
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Gobet
*, Fernand
1
& Harvey Whitehouse
.
1.
1. Explaining Religion
Project, Institute of Social
& Cultural Anthropology
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
2.
2.-3. Centre for the
Study of Expertise
Dept. of Psychology
Brunel University
Uxbridge, UK
3.
Very important step!!!
Introduction
What role does
organizations?

mood
play
in
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• We approach this question by studying game
religious
playing.
• Specifically, we chose a well-studied game
Religions differ in how much euphoria and
dysphoria their members experience.
 Euphoria: positive emotion, elation, wellbeing (e.g. in Pentacostalism).

called the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) task, shown in
Box 1.
• Games are not the same as rituals (e.g. no
Dysphoria: negative emotion, anxiety,
unpleasantness (e.g. “fire and brimstone”).
goal demotion), but like rituals they have strict
rules to follow.

Mood is a “background emotional state that
rises and dissipates slowly”

Research in psychology has shown that mood
influences your style of cognitive processing


We will put participants in either a euphoric or
dysphoric mood.

We predict that euphoric participants (who
see the “big picture”) will be better at analogical
reasoning.
Euphoria promotes a more global, schematic
style of information processing: i.e. you see the
“big picture”

Dysphoria promotes a narrower,
focused style of information processing.

If true, then we can say that euphoric
participants are better at applying their
religious lessons to everyday life.

details-
We also predict the mood effects will only be
effective if the participant has some prior
knowledge (expertise).

Do religions differ in their success rate (e.g.
perpetuation, recruitment) according to their
relative amounts of euphoria and dysphoria?

Congratulations!!!
Participants
There were 67 participants recruited at Brunel
University, London, UK


Mean age 23.6 years (SD = 3.9)

There were 30 males and 37 females
They were 43% Christian, 21% Muslim, 15% nonreligious, 12% Hindu, 4.5% Sikh, and 4.5% Buddhist.

Results
Apparatus

Figure 1: Screenshot of the “Bear God” task at the
beginning of the game.
There were 3 computer games

Figure 2: Missionary Cannibal Game
Tower of Hanoi (TOH): see Box 1
Missionary Cannibal (MC) game: a simpler
game where the aim is to move all characters
to the other side of the river (see Fig. 2), but
where cannibals can never outnumber the
missionaries. The rules were non-equivalent
to TOH.

Bear God (BG) game: this was a TOHisomorph (i.e. where the rules were the same
but the presentation was different), the aim of
which was to move the five rituals into the
leader shaman’s box. The two rules (see Fig.
1) were equivalent to TOH rules

Rules: (1) the more serious ritual cannot be placed into a box where
there is already a less serious ritual (equiv. to TOH rule 1), and (2)
only one ritual can be moved at a time (equiv. to TOH rule 2).
All games were played on a laptop computer
The Affect Grid (see Fig. 3) was used as a
manipulation check

There were two 10 minute film clips that were
shown in order to induce either a positive or
negative mood

“The Trouble with Mr. Bean” (1991), an
excerpt from the comedy series

“Threads” (1984), a very unpleasant film
depicting a nuclear war with injury and death

Expert Euphoric
TOH
BG
Expert Dysphoric
TOH
BG
Figure 5 shows the number of games solved
according to condition (see Fig. 4 for conditions)

Procedure
There were a significant effect of expertise
(Kruskal-Wallis χ2 = 9.125, p = .003).

Participants were not told the true purpose of the study
until the end

There were four conditions (see Fig. 4) and two
independent variables (mood, expertise)

Participants filled out the Affect Grid (Fig. 3) four times
during the procedure.



There were two dependent variables: (1)
number of BG game solved, (2) duration of BG
game (shorter avg. time indicated more skilled play)

All participants watched a film clip
They were told to watch the video closely because it
was a memory test (they could not be told that it was a
mood induction)

If they were in the euphoric conditions, then they
watched the comedy

At first, we could not find a significant effect
of mood (Kruskal-Wallis χ2 = 0.198, p = .657).
BG
However, with the Zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP)
regression (specialized for zero-heavy data)
we found that the expert dysphoric condition
was a significant predictor (z = 3.19, p = .001).

For duration of game (shorter avg. time
indicates better performance), there was only a
significant effect of expertise.

Our other prediction – that experts would
outperform non-experts – was confirmed.


Mood manipulation was successful.
If they were in the dysphoric conditions, then they
watched the unpleasant film.

Then, every participant played the first game
Stress
Excitement
Euphoria may not have been as effective as
we thought for transferring knowledge from
your teachings to everyday life.

Every game was played for 15 minutes. If the
participant solved the game prior to 15 minutes, they
were asked to continue restarting their game until the
time limit.
If they were in the expert conditions, then they played
the TOH game (Box 1)


Then, the participant played the second game

All participants played the BG game (Fig. 1)
No participants were told that the BG game had the
same rules as the TOH game

After the study was complete, the participant learned
the true purpose of the study.

Our results have implications for religious
movements and how emotion plays a role.

High Arousal

BG
Figure 4: The four conditions of the
experiment
This was only true in the expert condition. It
seems that mood makes no difference if there is
no knowledge to back it up.


Non-expert Dysphoric
MC
Our prediction was that the euphoric individuals would outperform the dysphoric ones.
Unexpectedly, we found the opposite. Dysphoric
individuals did better at solving the BG game.

Pleasant
Feelings
Unpleasant
Feelings
If they were in the non-expert condition, then they
played the MC game (Fig. 2)
MC
Discussion


Non-expert Euphoric
Figure 5: Number of times the the BG game was
solved according to condition
It could be that dysphoria is better for
specifically procedural aspects of religion,
such as the following of rituals.

If people are instilled with a sense of
urgency about applying lessons to everyday
life, then that might be a more effective
method than simply making them joyful.

Depression
Sleepiness
Relaxation
Figure 3: The Affect Grid. Participants were
asked to mark an “X” in the single square that
represents their current mood
Funded by a
research grant
from the
European
Commission