Walking the Ambiguous Path: The Differential Effects of Religious Priming on Tolerance of Ambiguity in Chinese Taoists and Christians

In many religions, binary moral distinctions, such as the dichotomy between good versus evil or right versus wrong, provide clear and unambiguous guidelines for behavior. Experimental evidence from Western contexts, particularly among Christians, indicates that these binary moral frameworks can reduce an individual's tolerance for ambiguity. In the current research, we critically examined this prevailing assumption by demonstrating that religious priming can actually increase Chinese Taoists' tolerance for ambiguous information. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments involving different religious priming procedures and diverse measures of ambiguity tolerance. In Study 1, we found that Taoist participants exposed to religious priming through a sentence unscrambling task exhibited higher levels of ambiguity tolerance compared to those undergoing neutral priming. Moving beyond self-report measures, Study 2 provided behavioral confirmation of the findings from Study 1. In Study 3, we extended our laboratory findings to real-life contexts by examining how the presence of religious buildings influenced ambiguity tolerance. Across all three studies, we also replicated previous findings that religious priming could reduce Christians' tolerance for ambiguity within the Chinese context. Taken together, these findings suggest that religious systems may have a long-lasting and diverging impact on their believers' basic cognitive processes.