People often set moral compass to God's

CHICAGO, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- People often set their personal moral compasses according to what they presume to be God's standards, U.S. and Australian researchers found.

Study leader Nicholas Epley of University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and colleagues at Australia's Monash University and University of Chicago said their findings involved seven separate studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The studies included surveys of Boston rail commuters, University of Chicago undergraduates and a nationally representative U.S. database of online respondents. In these surveys, participants reported their own belief about an issue, their estimated God's belief, along with a variety of others, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Major League Baseball's Barry Bonds, former President George W. Bush and an average American.

Other studies had participants to write and deliver a speech that supported or opposed the death penalty in front of a video camera. Their beliefs were surveyed both before and after the speech.

The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person.

The brain scan data demonstrated that reasoning about God's beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.