Calling all churches, Planet Earth is your new marketing tool.
Though the BBC’s nature-focused series is far from a religious promotional video, a new study shows that Americans who watch Planet Earth are more likely to believe in a god or a higher power, the Independent reports.
In a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, scientists asked a group participants watch Planet Earth and another group to watch a news program. Afterward, researchers surveyed both groups on how much awe they felt while watching the footage and whether they thought life was mapped out according to some divine being’s plan.
Piercarlo Valdesolo, a psychological scientist from Claremount McKenna College who led the study, said that those who tended to believe in a higher power watched Planet Earth and were more likely to believe in God compared to the group that watched news. Valdesolo points out that the results are indicative of how people search for explanations, regardless of logic.
“The irony in this is that gazing upon things that we know to be formed by natural causes, such as the jaw-dropping expanse of the Grand Canyon, pushes us to explain them as the product of supernatural causes,” he said.
Epiphanies are typically explained by being awe-struck by a supernatural figure, but Valdesolo believes it’s the other way around.
“We wanted to test the exact opposite prediction: It’s not that the presence of the supernatural elicits awe, it’s that awe elicits the perception of the presence of the supernatural,” he said.
The researchers are now testing whether submissive body postures — including religious practices of gazing up, kneeling or bowing — could make people more susceptible to awe.