Non-Christians want you to keep your thoughts and prayers to yourself during times of tragedy, according to a new report.
Researchers Linda Thunström and Shiri Noy conducted an experiment with 400 Christian, atheist and agnostic survivors of Hurricane Florence in an attempt to place value on thoughts and prayers. Participants of other religious faiths were excluded from the study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The North Carolina residents were given $5 and asked if they would exchange cash for supportive thoughts or prayers from strangers or priests.
After every tragedy — from hurricanes to mass shootings — offering “thoughts and prayers” has become a common response from policymakers and the public.
“Despite the frequent usage of these gestures on behalf of people experiencing hardship, the value of thoughts and prayers to recipients remains unknown,” the study said. “In the United States, this knowledge vacuum exacerbates public debate about the value of thoughts and prayers.”
Experiment results found that on average, Christians valued prayers from a priest at $7.17 — more than $2 above what was allotted by researchers.
“We saw a lot of people who chose $5 exactly, and what that suggests is that we might not have been good at predicting how much they’d be willing to pay for a prayer,” Thunström said. “But a lot of those people were likely to pay more but were just not able to because of the terms of the study.”
So study authors used statistical analysis to help “predict what the true willingness to pay might have been” if researchers had not capped the amount at $5.
Results also showed that Christians valued prayers from a Christian stranger at $4.36.
But atheists were willing to pay just to be left alone.
The nonreligious offered priests an average of $1.66 not to pray for them, and $3.54 to avoid prayers from Christian strangers.
“Our results suggest that thoughts and prayers for others should be employed selectively,” researchers wrote. “While Christians value such gestures from fellow believers, nonreligious people negatively value such gestures from Christians.”
Hurricane Florence brought misery to North Carolina last year when it tore through, claiming at least 43 lives and causing about $24 billion in damage. Severe flooding turned the coast into a contaminated wasteland, and caused excessive breeding among frogs and mosquitoes.