Replication of a study from “Collective transcendence beliefs shape the sacredness of objects: the case of art” (JPSP | Chen, Ruttan & Feinberg, 2022)

We ran a replication of study 4 from this paper, which found that people’s perceptions of an artwork as sacred are shaped by collective transcendence beliefs (“beliefs that an object links the collective to something larger and more important than the self, spanning space and time”). In the study, participants viewed an image of a painting and read a paragraph about it. All participants saw the same painting, but depending on the experimental condition, the paragraph was designed to make it seem spiritually significant, historically significant, both, or neither. Participants then answered questions about how they perceived the artwork. Most of the original study’s methods and data were shared transparently, but the exclusion procedures and related data were only partially available. Most (90%) of the original study’s findings replicated. In both the original study and our replication, “collective meaning” (i.e., the perception that the artwork has a “deeper meaning to a vast number of people”) was found to mediate the relationships between all the experimental conditions and the perceived sacredness of the artwork. The original study’s discussion was partly contradicted by its mediation results table, and the control condition, which was meant to control for uniqueness, did not do so; the original paper would have been clearer if it had addressed these points.