Blessed
Gross Gods and Icky Atheism: Disgust Responses to Rejected Religious Beliefs
Ryan Ritter & Jesse Lee Preston
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Disgust is an emotional response that helps to maintain and protect physical and spiritual purity by signaling contamination and motivating the restoration of personal cleanliness. In the present research we predicted that disgust may be elicited by contact with outgroup religious beliefs, as these beliefs pose a threat to spiritual purity. Two experiments tested this prediction using a repeated taste-test paradigm in which participants tasted and rated a drink before and after copying a passage from an outgroup religion. In Experiment 1, Christian participants showed increased disgust after writing a passage from the Qur'an or Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but not a control text. Experiment 2 replicated this effect, and also showed that contact with an ingroup religious belief (Christians copying from the Bible) did not elicit disgust. Moreover, Experiment 2 showed that disgust to rejected beliefs was eliminated when participants were allowed to wash their hands after copying the passage, symbolically restoring spiritual cleanliness. Together, these results provide evidence that contact with rejected religious beliefs elicits disgust by symbolically violating spiritual purity. Implications for intergroup relations between religious groups is discussed, and the role of disgust in the protection of beliefs that hold moral value.
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Benjamin Zeller
Church History, June 2011, Pages 321-351
Abstract:
This article traces the basic qualities of big science and applies them to the history of what I envision as "big religion." Big religion offers a model for understanding several developments in mid-century American religious history, including religious revival within the mainline churches and synagogues, an evangelical resurgence, and various forms of backlash as well. Like big science, big religion peaked during the postwar era (though it built on earlier foundations) and is characterized by heightened institutionalization, professionalization, centralization of knowledge, government entanglements, and public support, as well as opposition. With big science as a guide, the concept of big religion offers historians of American religion an analogous manner of understanding the development of institutions, individuals, and movements within American religion, as well as responses and backlashes against them, as part of the same overarching phenomenon.
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Testing the Protestant Ethic Thesis with Quantitative Historical Data: A Research Note
Stephen Sanderson, Seth Abrutyn & Kristopher Proctor
Social Forces, March 2011, Pages 905-911
Abstract:
We provide a test of the thesis that Protestantism influenced the development of modern capitalism by using quantitative data from 1500 through 1870. Results show that during this period the percentage of a country's population that is Protestant is unrelated to both its level of per capita GDP and the average rate of its annual growth in per capita GDP. We conclude that the thesis that the Protestant ethic has been an important factor in the growth of modern capitalism is not supported.
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Oxytocin Infusion Increases Charitable Donations Regardless of Monetary Resources
Jorge Barraza et al.
Hormones and Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined if the prosocial effects of oxytocin (OT) extend from individuals to a generalized other who is in need. Participants played a series of economic games to earn money and were presented with an opportunity to donate a portion of their earnings to charity. OT did not significantly increase the decision to donate, but among the 36% of participants who did donate, people infused with OT were found to donate 48% more to charity than those given a placebo. The amount of money earned in the experiment had no effect on whether or not a donation was made or the size of a donation. This is the first study showing that OT increases generosity in unilateral exchanges directed toward philanthropic social institutions, as opposed to immediate benefits directed at individuals or groups.
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Wrath of God: Religious primes and punishment
Ryan McKay et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 June 2011, Pages 1858-1863
Abstract:
Recent evidence indicates that priming participants with religious concepts promotes prosocial sharing behaviour. In the present study, we investigated whether religious priming also promotes the costly punishment of unfair behaviour. A total of 304 participants played a punishment game. Before the punishment stage began, participants were subliminally primed with religion primes, secular punishment primes or control primes. We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviours for a subset of our participants - those who had previously donated to a religious organization. We discuss two proximate mechanisms potentially underpinning this effect. The first is a 'supernatural watcher' mechanism, whereby religious participants punish unfair behaviours when primed because they sense that not doing so will enrage or disappoint an observing supernatural agent. The second is a 'behavioural priming' mechanism, whereby religious primes activate cultural norms pertaining to fairness and its enforcement and occasion behaviour consistent with those norms. We conclude that our results are consistent with dual inheritance proposals about religion and cooperation, whereby religions harness the byproducts of genetically inherited cognitive mechanisms in ways that enhance the survival prospects of their adherents.
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Joseph Corabi
Religious Studies, June 2011, Pages 233-244
Abstract:
The view that consignment to hell is a matter of having a fixed vicious character of a certain sort - rather than a matter of paying a retributive penalty for sin - is quite popular among philosophical theologians today. However, if proponents of this view wish to maintain that some individuals wind up consigned to hell, and if they embrace a number of independently plausible assumptions, they will be forced toward unreasonable claims about character development and its relationship to consignment to hell. In this paper, I describe the difficulties for these philosophical theologians.
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Can supporting a cause decrease donations and happiness? The cause marketing paradox
Aradhna Krishna
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two laboratory and one pilot field study, we demonstrate that cause marketing, whereby firms link products with a cause and share proceeds with it, reduces charitable giving by consumers, even when it is costless to the consumer to buy on CM (versus not); further, instead of increasing total contribution to the cause, it can decrease it. Consumers appear to realize that participating in cause marketing is inherently more selfish than direct charitable donation, and are less happy if they substitute cause marketing for charitable giving. Our results suggest that egoistic and empathetic altruism may have different effects on happiness.
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The demand for products linked to public goods: Evidence from an online field experiment
Brian McManus & Richard Bennet
Journal of Public Economics, June 2011, Pages 403-415
Abstract:
We conduct a field experiment at a nonprofit organization's online store to study how demand changes when consumers' purchases can generate revenue for a charitable cause. When purchases can trigger a small donation by an outside anonymous group, consumers respond strongly and apparently without regard for the specific conditions that trigger the donation. Consumers respond similarly when the outside donation requires a personal donation which consumers generally decline. When the outside donations are relatively large, however, consumers appear to pay close attention to the trigger conditions, and increase their purchases only where needed to generate the outside donation. Overall, increasing the salience of financial incentives weakens consumers' positive responses to the outside group's donation pledges. We also present evidence that the donation pledges have positive long-term effects on demand and may reduce price sensitivity.
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Whom to help? Immediacy bias in judgments and decisions about humanitarian aid
Michaela Huber et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
People exhibit an immediacy bias when making judgments and decisions about humanitarian aid, perceiving as more deserving and donating disproportionately to humanitarian crises that happen to arouse immediate emotion. The immediacy bias produced different serial position effects, contingent on decision timing (Experiment 1). When making allocation decisions directly after viewing to four emotionally evocative films about four different humanitarian crises, participants donated disproportionately more to the final, immediate crisis, in contrast, when making donation decisions sequentially, after viewing each of the four crises, participants donated disproportionately to the immediate crisis. The immediacy bias was associated with "scope neglect," causing people to take action against relatively less deadly crises (Experiments 2 and 3). The immediacy bias emerged even when participants were warned about emotional manipulation (Experiment 3). The immediacy bias diminished over time, as immediate emotions presumably subsided (Experiment 2). Implications for charitable giving, serial position effects, and the influence of emotion on choice are discussed.
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Does Religion Influence Fertility in Developing Countries
Tim Heaton
Population Research and Policy Review, June 2011, Pages 449-465
Abstract:
This paper examines religious group differences in fertility in developing nations. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys of 30 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, this paper documents Muslim/Christian and Catholic/Protestant differences in the number of children under age 5. The paper also considers possible explanations for these differences including level of development, religious mix, social characteristics and proximate determinants of fertility. Muslim fertility is substantially higher than Christian fertility in many countries, but the average difference between Catholics and Protestants is small. Cross-national variation in group differences is at least as large as the average difference. Although level of development, social characteristics and proximate determinants play an important role in religious differences, they do not explain cross-national variation in these differences.
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"Protective donation": When refusing a request for a donation increases the sense of vulnerability
Tehila Kogut & Ilana Ritov
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
May refusing a request for a donation be conceived as 'tempting fate'? Do people feel more vulnerable when they do not comply with such a request? In this paper we examine the link between subjective perceptions of vulnerability and people's willingness to help address a threatening cause. Results of five studies, examining a real life situation, hypothetical scenarios and a controlled lab game with actual monetary costs and rewards, show first, that deliberately helping is positively correlated with the perceived likelihood of becoming a victim of the same misfortune. Second, we show that refusing to donate to a threatening misfortune increases sense of vulnerability. Both phenomena occur especially for people with strong belief in a just world, who believe in a causal relationship between people's behavior and their fortune (rewards and punishments).
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Robert Brathwaite & Andrew Bramsen
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article argues that the relationship between democracy and the separation of religion and state needs to be reexamined. We argue that previous studies have misconceptualized the impact that a lack of church-state separation can have on democracy, or have taken a narrow focus by concentrating on specific cases. We use principal component analysis and a large-n data set covering 125 countries to show that the separation of religion and state should be conceptualized multi-dimensionally and that it should be considered a component of democracy. Our findings show that as separation of religion and state increases, the level of democracy also increases.
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Andrew Village
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, forthcoming
Abstract:
This cross-sectional study tested the idea that personality is indirectly related to outgroup prejudice through religiosity and through outgroup contact. A total of 2,756 White adolescents from Northern England completed a questionnaire that included measures of outgroup prejudice, extraversion, tough-mindedness, religiosity and outgroup contact. Correlation and path analysis indicated that extraversion had no direct effect on outgroup prejudice, but was associated with greater outgroup contact, which in turn was associated with lower prejudice. Psychoticism was associated directly with higher levels of prejudice, and indirectly via religiosity because high psychoticism was associated with low religiosity, and low religiosity was associated with high prejudice. There was no direct relationship between age and prejudice but a decline in religiosity between early and midadolescence was associated with an increase in prejudice. Implications of the findings for the study of prejudice in adolescents and adults are discussed.
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The Conflicting Influences of Religiosity on Attitude Toward Torture
Ariel Malka & Christopher Soto
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines the thesis that religiosity has conflicting influences on Americans' attitudes about the use of torture on terrorism suspects: an organic influence favoring opposition to torture and a discursively driven influence favoring support of torture. In each of two national samples, religiosity had both a direct effect toward opposition to torture and an indirect effect - via conservative political alignment - toward support of torture. Multiple-group analyses revealed that the direct effect toward opposition to torture did not vary across Americans with differing levels of exposure to political discourse, whereas the indirect effect toward support of torture via conservative political alignment was much stronger among Americans highly exposed to political discourse. Among such individuals, the indirect effect was so strong that it completely counteracted the competing direct effect. Discussion focuses on the competing influences that a single nonpolitical psychological characteristic may have on a political preference.
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The evolution of superstition through optimal use of incomplete information
Kevin Abbott & Thomas Sherratt
Animal Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
While superstitions appear maladaptive, they may be the inevitable result of an adaptive causal learning mechanism that simultaneously reduces the risk of two types of errors: the error of failing to exploit an existing causal relationship and the error of trying to exploit a nonexistent causal relationship. An individual's exploration-exploitation strategy is a key component of managing this trade-off. In particular, on any given trial, the individual must decide whether to give the action that maximizes its expected fitness based on current information (exploit) or to give the action that provides the most information about the true nature of the causal relationship (explore). We present a version of this 'two-armed bandit' problem that allows us to identify the optimal exploration-exploitation strategy, and to determine how various parameters affect the probability that an individual will develop a superstition. We find that superstitions are more likely when the cost of the superstition is low relative to the perceived benefits, and when the individual's prior beliefs suggest that the superstition is true. Furthermore, we find that both the total number of learning trials available, and the nature of the individual's uncertainty affect the probability of superstition, but that the nature of these effects depends on the individual's prior beliefs.
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The Effect of Religious Leaders' Emotional and Social Competencies on Improving Parish Vibrancy
Richard Boyatzis, Terry Brizz & Lindsey Godwin
Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, May 2011, Pages 192-206
Abstract:
Pastoral leaders of parishes have an effect on people's lives and communities. Improvement in parishioner satisfaction and support (i.e., donations and attendance) over 3 years were assessed with the Parish Vibrancy Study of 135 parishes in a Catholic Diocese. In 52 of the parishes of this diocese, the priest's demonstration of emotional and social competencies as seen by others had a positive effect on improvement of parishioner satisfaction but not on their support. The behavioral expressions of power and humility in the form of Influence versus Inspirational Leadership and Transparency versus Self-Confidence competencies were related to improvement in parishioner satisfaction. Size of the parish was related to improvement in parishioner support only.