Question 2 — Does Behavioral Religiosity Predict Frequency of Seeking Moral Advice from AI Chatbots?

While self-reported religiosity captures individuals’ global self-identification as religious, behavioral measures may provide a more nuanced and less socially desirable index of religious engagement. We constructed a Religious Behavior Score averaging two items: “How often do you attend religious services/ pray?” (1=never, 7=once a day or more) to capture both social and individual aspects of religious engagement. In the remaining main analyses, we use this score as the primary predictor, deferring self-reported religiosity to Supplementary.

We first examined whether Religious Behavior Score predicts AI moral advice seeking across both studies.

Table 1: Pearson Correlations Between Religious Behavior Score and Frequency of Seeking Moral Advice From AI Chatbots

Study	N	r	t	df	p
Study 1	348	0.31	6.05	346	<.001
Study 2	347	0.33	6.51	345	<.001

Figure 1: Religious Behavior Score and Frequency of Seeking Moral Advice from AI Chatbots

Follow-up linear regression analyses confirmed that behavioral religiosity significantly predicted frequency of seeking moral advice from AI chatbots in both simple (Model 1) and covariate-adjusted models (Model 2), with effect sizes consistently exceeding those of self-reported religiosity.

Table 2: Religious Behavior Score Predicting Frequency of Seeking Moral Advice from AI Chatbots

	Model 1					Model 2
Study	b	SE	95% CI LL	95% CI UL	p	b	SE	95% CI LL	95% CI UL	p
Study 1	0.32	0.05	0.21	0.42	< .001	0.30	0.06	0.18	0.42	< .001
Study 2	0.36	0.05	0.25	0.46	< .001	0.30	0.06	0.18	0.42	< .001

Religious Behavior Score consistently and positively predicted the frequency of seeking moral advice from AI chatbots in Studies 1 and 2, effects that were robust to the inclusion of demographic covariates.