Sure. And I would expect your starting assumption to be that I'm average per the study. My only point is that it would be a mistake to assume all people behave per the average statistic of the study. If some aren't average, why not me?
The study doesn't tell you the average; it uses random sample of a population (e.g. believer, non-believer) in the given context, and tests the samples, which gives an indication of the population behaviour and the differences between populations in that respect. So for an individual in either population, it gives an indication of how likely they are to have the measured trait, and - if it has a distribution of values - by how much. Even where there is a distribution of values, the average only indicates the mean value of the trait strength, some may be above that value, some below.
So, whether you trust my self-assessment or not, I don't think I behave in the manner indicated in the study.
I think you're mistaken in your interpretation of what the study says (see above), and I'm sceptical of your self-assessment because these are subconscious effects - the only way you'd be aware of them would be if you had been a participant or you knew about the effect and tested yourself - but this is fraught with error, as even if you recognised that your moral stance hardened or softened according to your recent experiences, you would still not expect that to affect your beliefs about God's stance on it, so you'd be likely to have a natural bias against that result. That's why the scientific method has been developed, to minimize the effect of such biases; as Richard Feynman said (about the search for knowledge), "
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
But what is the point of the study?
Did you not even read the abstract? It is known that people often use their own beliefs as a guide to reason about what others may believe; the results tend to be biased towards their own beliefs (i.e. as if the other person had similar beliefs to their own and reasoned about them similarly).
The study wanted to discover whether this applied to believer's reasoning about their God's beliefs; so they tested for the correlation between the subject's own beliefs, and their beliefs about their God's beliefs, and between their own beliefs and their beliefs about other people's beliefs. They also did the comparison when the subject's moral stance had been modified by recent experience.
They found that people's own beliefs are more closely correlated with their beliefs about their God's beliefs than their beliefs about other people's beliefs. They found that this was also true when they modified the subject's moral stance.
Tellingly, they also found that when brain activity was measured, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs.
The conclusion, based on surveys
and neurological observations: "
Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs."
But I'm suspicious they're poking at something else. Some, "This god of yours is just in your head," message.
The evidence only refers to what believers think their God believes: believers tend to refer to their own beliefs when assessing what their God's beliefs are or would be. They don't do this to the same extent when assessing what other people's beliefs are or would be.
In other words, whether God is in their heads or not, what they think about God's beliefs tends to be based on their own beliefs rather than vice-versa, and more so than what they think about other's beliefs.
A fairly simple concept, but not easy to describe clearly
