Thinking About God Encourages Prosociality Toward Religious Outgroups: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Religious Studies
• Behavioral Economics

Background:

• Religious beliefs are widespread and often linked to prosocial behavior within religious groups.
• A key question is whether this prosociality extends beyond the in-group to religious out-groups.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if thinking about God influences prosocial behavior towards both religious in-group and out-group members.
• To examine the extent of intergroup cooperation facilitated by religious beliefs in diverse cultural contexts.

Main Methods:

• Conducted field and online experiments with 4,753 Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish adults across the Middle East, Fiji, and the United States.
• Participants decided how much money to share with anonymous strangers from different ethno-religious backgrounds.
• A manipulation involved participants either thinking about their god or not before making their decision.

Main Results:

• Thinking about God significantly increased participants' monetary giving by 11% (4.17% of the total stake).
• This increase in generosity was equally distributed between members of the participant's own religious group and members of other religious groups.
• The effect was observed across diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts.

Conclusions:

• Belief in a god or gods can enhance prosociality that extends beyond religious in-groups.
• Religious priming may serve as a mechanism to foster intergroup cooperation, particularly in economic exchanges.
• These findings suggest that religion can play a role in bridging divides and promoting cooperation even in contexts marked by intergroup tension.