Does Prayer Prevent Drinking?

Tom Rees has a blog posting today that caught my eye. It's about a recent study that looked at the drinking habits of religious students and found that those who prayed regularly during a four-week period drank only about half as much as those who focused on "good thoughts" instead. Why would this be?

Nate Lambert, the researcher who led the study, has two ideas, as Rees notes:

First is that prayer may help to improve your relationships with others (that's something Lambert has shown in an earlier study). And if relationships are stronger, then you'll have less need to turn to drink to overcome social barriers.
His second theory is that spirituality and alcohol consumption are alternative routes to relieve the "burden of self." This is the idea that, particularly in Western cultures, people are under high pressure to succeed as individuals. By turning to prayer, people may have less need to turn to the bottle.
Personally, I think something else is going on here. By making people pray every day, what you are doing is reminding people constantly of their religion. It's called priming. And by doing that, you remind them of their cultural expectations—and also remind them that god is watching them.
In other words, you'd expect daily prayer to encourage people to conform to whatever it is they think their god wants—in this case temperance!