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Religion and Economic Behavior

By RYAN SAGER

What does your religion mean in your everyday life? What does it mean to be a

Protestant? A Catholic? A Jew? Sure, it means holding certain views about the

supernatural. It may mean attending certain services at certain times in certain

places. Maybe it affects whom you marry or the values you try to impart to your

children.

But how does it affect the way you live your everyday life? The things listed above are

all decisions youre likely to make while thinking consciously about your religion. Iwant to marry a nice Jewish girl; Im not a good Christian if I dont go to church

every Sunday; I want to teach my children to be good Catholics.

A new study(PDF), though, looks at how people of different religions make

economic decisions in a laboratory setting when theyve beenprimedwith the

concept of religion but are notthinking about it consciously.

Basically, the researchers, from Cornell and Yale, put subjects through economic

experiments in the lab but, before the decision-making parts of the experiments,

they primed the subjects with the concept of religion by having them unscramblesentences with religion-related content: she felt the spirit, the dessert was divine,

give thanks to God, the book was sacred, and prophets reveal the future. Then,

the subjects participated in the economic task. After the task, they completed a

debriefing questionnaire to get their demographic information, including religion.

(Participants were also asked, in the debriefing questionnaire, What do you think

this study is about? Anyone who answered anything to do with religion [only 3 of

685 guessed it] had their results thrown out.)

So, what did the researchers find?:We find that Protestantism increases contributions to public goods. Catholicism

decreases contributions to public goods, decreases expectations of others

contributions to public goods, and may decrease risk aversion. Judaism increases

reciprocity.

http://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/jjc83/religion.pdfhttp://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/jjc83/religion.pdfhttp://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/jjc83/religion.pdfhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29http://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/jjc83/religion.pdf

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The study, unfortunately, doesnt give us a lot of insight into why these particular

religious identities have these particular effects. Though, it gives us some clues.

Here, for instance, is a description of how the public goods game works:

Each subject was assigned to a group of four and endowed with $1. Each subject couldcontribute any fraction of his or her dollar to a group account. Contributions would be doubled

and then distributed evenly among the four group members. Subjects kept any money that they

did not contribute. Total group earnings are maximized (at $2 per group member) if each

member contributes his or her entire dollar to the group account.

So, as you might imagine, thinking well of your fellow players in the game or

trusting them more leads to a higher contribution to the public good and a better

outcome for everyone. The Catholics in the sample seem to have had a lower opinion

of their fellow man (or woman) and that was even without the priming. With the

priming for religion, they thought even less well of their fellow players.

Protestants, meanwhile, contributed more in this game when primed with the idea of

religion. It also appears their contributions increased at least in part depending on

the extent to which they believed in divine punishment.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of the paper, though, concerns agnostics and

atheists. Despite the fact that these folks presumably have no particular religious

identity as we traditionally think of it, they nonetheless contributed more to the

public good when primed with religion:

Interestingly, the prime has a marginally significant effect on atheists and agnostics, increasingtheir contributions by 11 cents Since it seems likely that there are no strong norms

associated with an agnostic identity, the agnostic/atheist priming effect may be

due to the activation of residual religious norms present among these subjects.

It just goes to prove: Even as we try to leave the murk of religion behind us, the

norms associated with it are still the water in which we rational fish swim