There are many ways to express
identity. If you walk down the street,
you will see people wearing t-shirts with brands of products on them. They carry coffee mugs with the names of
coffee companies. They carry bags that
are branded with the logos of companies.
People also express their identity
through religion. Religious beliefs can
influence the actions people take. In
addition, people may wear religious symbols on shirts or jewelry. They may put religious symbols on their cars.
In may ways, of course, religion
and products seem fundamentally incompatible.
Religion focuses on the sacred and the spiritual. Brands focus on the earthly and material.
A fascinating paper by Keisha
Cutright, Tulin Erdem, Gavan Fitzsimons, and Ron Shachar in the December, 2014
issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
examined whether commitment to brands interferes with commitment to
religion.
In one preliminary study,
participants were asked to choose between a pair of coffee mugs and a pair of
t-shirts. For half the participants, the
items had a brand name on them (Starbucks on the mug, Adidas on the
t-shirts). For the other half, the
products were unbranded. Later in the
study, participants filled out scales to rate the strength of their commitment
to religion and how often they attend religious services. Participants who made choices of branded
products exhibited a lower commitment to religion and commitment to attend
religious services than those who made choices of products without brand names.
A second study asked participants
to think and write about one of two types of brands. Some participants were asked to write about a
brand that really said something about their personality. Other participants were asked to write about
a brand that they thought was functional but did not say anything about their
personality. Later, they completed the
scales of religious commitment. In this
study, participants rated their religious commitment as lower if they wrote
about brands that relate to their identity than if they wrote about brands that
were purely functional.
In another study, participants
selected a t-shirt for themselves, for another person, or for both themselves
and another person. For some
participants, the t-shirts had a company brand on them, but for other
participants the t-shirts had no brand. Later,
they rated their religious commitment, but also were given an opportunity to
donate up to one dollar to either a group of faith-based charities or to a
group of non faith-based charities.
Compared to the other groups, participants who chose a branded t-shirt for
themselves exhibited lower religious commitment and also donated less money to
faith-based charities than those who chose non-branded t-shirts or chose for
another person.
Control conditions in these
experiments demonstrated that commitment to brands influenced religious
commitment, but not commitment to other ways of expressing identity like
commitment to sports teams, art, music, or engaging in social
interactions.
What does all of this mean?
There is a tendency for people to
try to maintain some consistency in their beliefs at any given moment (even
though people may be quite inconsistent over time). So, when thinking about material goods, that
will strengthen people’s thoughts about their material self, and weaken aspects
of their self-concept that are inconsistent with that material self (including
aspects of self-concept related to religion).
It is important to recognize that
the effects observed in studies like this are short-term effects. That is, outside of the overt presence of
brands, people’s beliefs about their religiosity will return to whatever their
long-term state is.
However, these patterns of thought
can become habitual. To the extent that
we live in a world surrounded by brands that influence our self-concept, that
can make it harder to build up and maintain a more spiritual or religious
self-concept as well.
