A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the mostresearched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionalityand robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted amany-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation basedon a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10, 535 participants from 24countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whetherreligious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether therelation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends onperceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considerednormal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stageprocedure, the teamsfirst created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For thefirst research question, all but 3teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervalsexcluding zero (median reported Beta=0.120). For the second researchquestion, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported Beta=0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regressionmodels, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used toconstruct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.