The Effect of Prayer on God's Attitude Toward Mankind

That's the title of a paper by James Heckman in the new release of Economic Inquiry. Here's an ungated copy.

From the abstract:

This paper uses data available from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) survey on religious attitudes and powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings.

From the results:

A little prayer does no good and may make things worse. Much prayer helps a lot.

The appendix includes an interesting response from Father Andrew Greeley, a well known Catholic priest and sociologist.