God and the government: testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems.

By Aaron C. Kay, Danielle Gaucher, J. L. Napier, Mitchell J. Callan, Kristin Laurin. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008

788 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Health, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2609cbc8f0556991adb4254fc0e1ef8b1d7265ee

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Citations in the corpus

Evidence for the specificity of control motivations in worldview defense: Distinguishing compensatory control from uncertainty management and terror management processes. (2011, background): “…increase people's investment in a controllingGod (Kay,Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008), political and institutional sources of order (Kay et al., 2008; Rutjens, van Harreveld, & van der Pligt, 2010), and even powerful enemy figures viewed as controlling negative life events…”
The Beauty of Boundaries: When and Why We Seek Structure in Consumption (2012, background): “This is because the high control people will turn to God as their symbol of structure instead.”
Religiosity as Identity: Toward an Understanding of Religion From a Social Identity Perspective (2010, background): “As alluded to earlier, religiosity could be driven by the need for life purpose and meaning (Park, 2007), the desire for control in an unpredictable world (Kay et al., 2008), or the longing for self-enhancement (Sedikides, 2009).”
Doing it the hard way: How low control drives preferences for high-effort products and services (2014, methodology): “…first completed a control manipulation that asked them to write about something positive that happened because of something they did (i.e., something they had control over) or not because of something they did (i.e., something they did not have control over; Kay et al. 2008), keeping mood constant.”
Compensatory Control (2009, background): “These experimental results have been complemented by a crossnational study demonstrating that feelings of personal control are negatively correlated with increased preferences for governmental control—a relationship that held across 67 countries (Kay et al., 2008).”
More than fair: Outcome dependence, system justification, and the perceived legitimacy of authority figures (2011, background): “This enabled us to determine whether the effect of dependence on perceived legitimacy of authority was contingent on any of our other focal variables.”
The effects of religion on consumer behavior: A conceptual framework and research agenda (2016, background): “Benson & Spilka, 1973; Cutright, 2012; Kay et al. 2008 Rituals Rituals are symbolic, repeated behaviors that typically follow a formal script (i.e., performed in the same manner every time) (Rook, 1985).”
Belief in conspiracy theories: The influence of uncertainty and perceived morality (2013, background): “…conspiracy theories such consistency and clarity is found in the form of increased conspiracy beliefs (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), or rather, increased disbelief in conspiracies (Kay et al., 2008) may depend on yet unidentified factors or specific contingencies of the conspiracy theory in question.”
Deus or Darwin: Randomness and belief in theories about the origin of life (2010, positive): “The current findings fit well within the model of compensatory control (Kay et al., 2008).”
On the belief in God : Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control (2008, methodology): “ments of this theory ( Kay et al., 2008 ), to date there has been no experimental test of the main thrust of this idea: that the emotional discomfort produced by the experience of lowered levels of personal control is predictive of increased beliefs in the existence of a controlling God.”