Religion and Economic Behavior

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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 you’re likely to make while thinking consciously about your religion. I want to marry a nice Jewish girl; I’m not a good Christian if I don’t 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 they’ve been primed with the concept of religion but are not thinking 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 unscramble sentences 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.

The study, unfortunately, doesn’t 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 could contribute 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, increasing their 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.