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One argument in support of religiosity is that it makes people more moral. I am not particularly moved by this premise, as I find it a lot more impressive to be ethical, moral, kind, honest, and decent for reasons other than the fact that a "celestial dictator" (to borrow Christopher Hitchens' brilliant term) is watching over me. Moral and immoral acts are committed both by atheists and believers so neither group holds a monopoly over either form of behaviors.
That said I recently came across a paper by Azim F. Shariff and Ara Norenzayan published in Psychological Science that suggests that when individuals are primed about God, they behave more generously in the dictator game. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with this economic game, it works as follows: Individual A is given a fixed amount of money (say $20) and is asked to split the money with individual B, who has no veto power over the offer. In other words, if individual A decides to keep $18 and only offer $2 to individual B, this is the manner in which the money will be split. From a classical economic perspective, one should not offer anything to individual B although perhaps not surprisingly for all people other than economists, people do offer some amount greater than zero (e.g., because of reputational concerns).
Returning to the work by Shariff and Norenzayan, in the first study, they either primed participants with God concepts or did not prime them at all. Subsequently, they had them play an anonymous dictator game (i.e., they could not see individual B) with $10 (in one-dollar coins). People who were primed with God concepts offered $4.22 versus $1.84 in the no-prime condition. In the second study, the researchers had three priming conditions: God-prime, neutral-prime, and secular-prime (i.e., priming words such as "civic", "duty", and "police"). The offers were as follows: $4.60 in the God-prime, $4.40 in the secular-prime, and $2.60 in the neutral-prime condition. Hence, whereas the God and secular primes yielded roughly equal offers, both were higher than the neutral prime.
Interestingly, whereas the religiosity of the participants (i.e., whether they were atheists or theists) did not moderate the findings in study 1, in study 2 theists were more affected by the God-prime than were the atheists (in reality, the God-prime was ineffective on atheists).
Shariff and Norenzayan propose several competing explanations for these findings albeit the most compelling one might be the fact that the God prime cues individuals to the fact that an omnipotent force is watching your every move. In so doing, this augments people's likelihood of engaging in prosocial behavior. You see, I don't only report anti-religion findings!
Unrelated announcement: In two weeks, I will be celebrating one year since I first became a blogger for Psychology Today. The current post is my 51st post so I am roughly averaging one post per week. My first 50 posts have garnered 156,878 total views thus far (as of writing these words). I am very thankful to all the readers who have taken the time to visit my blog and in some instances have contributed to the subsequent debates. I hope to be as active in the forthcoming year. Many thanks for all of your support.
Source for Image:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f6/GOD.JPG/428px-GOD.J…
