(When) are religious people nicer? Religious salience and the “Sunday Effect” on pro-social behavior
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2010, Vol 5, Issue 2
Abstract
Prior research has found mixed evidence for the long-theorized link between religiosity and pro-social behavior. To help overcome this divergence, I hypothesize that pro-social behavior is linked not to religiosity per se, but rather to the salience of religion and religious norms. I report a field experiment that examined when auction participants will respond to an appeal to continue bidding for secular charitable causes. Religious individuals are more likely than non-religious individuals to respond to an appeal “for charity” only on days that they visit their place of worship; on other days of the week, religiosity has no effect. Notably, the result persists after controlling for a host of factors that may influence bidding, but disappears when the appeal “for charity” is replaced by an appeal to bid for other (i.e., competitive) reasons. Implications for the link between religion and pro-social behavior are discussed.
Authors and Affiliations
Deepak Malhotra
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677730
- DOI -
- Views 140
- Downloads 0
Validation of Adult Decision-Making Competence in Chinese college students
The present study was conducted to validate the Chinese version of the Adult Decision-Making Competence scale. 364 college students were recruited from four universities in China. The results indicate the Chinese Adult D...
Threshold models of recognition and the recognition heuristic
According to the recognition heuristic (RH) theory, decisions follow the recognition principle: Given a high validity of the recognition cue, people should prefer recognized choice options compared to unrecognized ones....
Is the call to prayer a call to cooperate? A field experiment on the impact of religious salience on prosocial behavior
While religiosity is positively correlated with self-reported prosociality, observational and experimental studies on the long-hypothesized connection between religion and prosocial behavior have yielded mixed results. R...
Decision-making styles and depressive symptomatology: Development of the Decision Styles Questionnaire
Difficulty making decisions is one of the symptoms of the depressive illness. Previous research suggests that depressed individuals may make decisions that differ from those made by the non-depressed, and that they use s...
A re-examination of the effect of contextual group size on people’s attitude to risk
Using Kahneman and Tversky’s life-death decision paradigm, Wang and colleagues (e.g., Wang & Johnston, 1995; Wang, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 2008; Wang et al., 2001) have shown two characteristic phenomena regarding people’s...