The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

After all, people are usually less prone to spending their life’s savings when they don't
believe it will help them. The independent measure was therefore action type (ritualized or
intentional) and the dependent measure was the rating of likelihood the main character would
act on the information.
The null hypothesis is that participants will not distinguish between ritualized and
intentional action. The alternative hypothesis presented here is that participants will make a
clear distinction between ritualized and intentional actions.
Experiment 1
Participants 23 males and 27 females, aged 16 to 21 (M = 18,18, SD 1,4); 75% from
North-Western Copenhagen, Denmark (Bagsværd Kostskole og Gymnasium) and 25% from
Esbjerg (Esbjerg Statsskole) in Western Denmark; 60 % Christian Protestant, 30% Non-
believers and Others were 10 %.
Materials A booklet was constructed with three fictive stories about a person's consultation
of a diviner in a foreign culture. The titles were: the kurabi among the Mwambesi of Africa,
the dendrologist among the Canadians in Toronto and the banban among the Katchikvi in
Vietnam. 42 The three different contexts, African Rural, Western Urban, and Asian Rural were
chosen to eliminate a bias towards primitivism and racial stereotypes. It would consequently
show as a difference between stories 1 and 3 on the one hand and 2 on the other if the results
were attributable to participants thinking that primitive people, like the hypothetical
Mwambesi, thought differently than modern people like the Canadians. The same goes for
racial stereotypes. If participants thought that Africans or Westerners thought essentially
differently we would also see a difference between any of the stories.
In these stories the main character was faced with a problem. These problems were
designed to match typical reasons for consultation, which can be found in the ethnographic
literature (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 261-262; Jackson 1978; e.g. Mendonsa 1982: 114). The
problems chosen were danger in relation to a journey, serious disease and choice of future
42 Since the research was carried out in Denmark the original material was written in Danish. See appendix 1
for a translation of the stories used.
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