Prayer In Psychological Perspectives

Prayer is close to the heart of many religious traditions. Prayer represents the human side of the hypothesized two-way communication between people and their God or gods. What people think they are doing when they are praying and what effect prayer has on the people who are doing the praying or on the people for whom prayer is offered are questions which have occupied psychologists and other empirical scientists of religion for well over a century.

The gauntlet was first thrown down for a proper scientific investigation of prayer by the 19th-century statistician Sir Francis Galton in two influential publications in 1872 and 1883. Galton argued that questions [Page 351]about the nature and effectiveness of prayer were not merely matters for philosophical and theological speculation, but were properly matters for empirical enquiry. The key research since Galton's pioneering challenge can best be summarized within three research categories concerned with the understanding of prayer, with the subjective effects of prayer, and with the objective effects of prayer.

Key research into the development of an understanding of prayer during childhood and adolescence was pioneered during the 1960s by Robert Thouless and Laurence Brown. In one of his studies, grounded in developmental psychology, Brown explored the responses of 398 boys and 703 girls between the ages of 12 and 17 to seven situations: success in a football match, safety during battle, avoidance of detection of theft, repayment of a debt, fine weather for a church fête, escape from a shark, and recovery of a sick grandmother. In relation to each situation he addressed two questions: Is it right to pray in this situation? Are the prayers likely to have any effect? The data demonstrated a consistent age-related trend away from belief in the causal efficacy of petitionery prayer.

A second classic study grounded in developmental psychology and concerned with agerelated stages in religious thinking during childhood and adolescence was reported by Ronald Goldman in the 1960s. Goldman employed projective picture tests to uncover the thinking of 200 young people between the ages of 8 and 16. He concluded that young people's concepts of prayer changed according to a fixed stage developmental sequence in accordance with Jean Piaget's model of intellectual development from preoperational thinking, through concrete operational thinking, to abstract operational thinking.

A very different theoretical framework was taken by Brown in two studies published in the 1990s grounded in social psychology. This time Brown examined the influence of home, church, and denominational identity on an attitudinal predisposition to pray and the practice of prayer among 4,948 11-year-olds and 711 16-year-olds. He demonstrated that among 16-year-olds the influence of church was stronger and the influence of parents weaker than among 11-year-olds. From these data he concluded that children and adolescents who pray were more likely to do so as a consequence of explicit teaching or implicit example from their family and church community than as a spontaneous consequence of developmental dynamics or needs.

The first study concerned with assessing the subjective effects of prayer on those who were doing the praying was reported by Francis Galton in his 1872 paper. Galton argued that clergy were a more prayerful group of people than either doctors or lawyers, and that if their prayers were effective, clergy should be expected to live longer than the other two groups. His first set of data, based on 945 clergy, 294 lawyers, and 244 medical men indeed demonstrated a higher life expectancy among clergy, but Galton dismissed this finding as evidence of the effectiveness of prayer on the grounds that their greater longevity might more readily be accounted for by their “easy country life and family repose.”

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