The research published in the journal of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality was the first to investigate the science behind prosperity gospel. Using two three-minute clips taken from Joel Osteen’s sermons – whose Houston-based Lakewood Church sees more than 50,000 attendees per week, with millions more viewers online – Hobson and the team of researchers randomly assigned one of the two clips, one with prosperity messaging and one without, to study participants and asked them watch it.Īfterwards they rated their level of optimism for the future on a scale that ranged from “much less/worse than others,” to “much more/better than others” – with anything more than “equal to others” suggesting the participant was unrealistically optimistic.

“In other words, it sort of primes people to want to part with their money by making them excited and optimistic,” said MacDonald, co-author of the study.Īnd because of the success of prosperity gospel messaging and its continued rise, Hobson saw the importance in studying the psychosocial effects the movement has on individuals’ mental functioning and well-being. Coupled with demonstrated positive thought, prosperity gospel has the ability to introduce intense positivity and optimism in its believers.

This means its teachings put financial prosperity, material wealth and ministry donations above all else. Prosperity gospel – often touted as one of the fastest-growing religious movements in America – centres around the idea that material blessings are part of God’s will. “While we know quite a bit about the psychology of religion and religious belief in general, the prosperity gospel is unlike many of the dominant religions that tend to be studied by psychologists,” said Hobson. Hobson, who is now the director of science at coaching service Psychology Compass, Geoff MacDonald, a professor in the department of psychology, and Juensung Kim, a PhD student in developmental psychology and education at U of T's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, studied the impact of prosperity gospel messaging on psychological functioning – an area Hobson says is still largely unknown. “Our findings show that participants said they’d likely experience more meaning, financial success, wealth and job stability compared to others after viewing a prosperity-related message,” said Nick Hobson, a former U of T PhD candidate and lead author of the study. New research out of the University of Toronto’s department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science suggests that exposure to prosperity gospel messaging – thinking God wants you to be wealthy, prosperous and donate money to the church – makes you more likely to show an exaggerated and unrealistic sense of optimism for life and take more financial risks. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Give American televangelist and prosperity preacher Joel Osteen three minutes of your time and he just might change your outlook on life.īut change doesn’t come without consequences. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Unrealistic optimism is one of several biases related to the self-concept, such as the better-than-average heuristic (whereby people believe they are better than others on a wide range of dimensions), the uniqueness bias (the belief that one’s abilities and moral attributes are unique), and the self-serving bias (thinking that one’s successes are due to internal causes and failures are due to external causes), and these various biases have similar causes, as enumerated in what follows. Other terms representing this bias are optimistic bias and illusion of unique invulnerability. However, unrealistic optimism can also be established by comparing a prediction with an actual outcome or with a more objective prediction of that outcome.

This bias was first defined by Neil Weinstein as a social comparison with others, namely, the mistaken belief that we are less likely than others to experience negative events and more likely to experience positive events. People are said to be unrealistically optimistic when they underestimate the chances of experiencing a negative event or overestimate the chances of experiencing a positive event.

Unrealistic optimism define