Religion Makes People Helpful And Generous

Religion Makes People Helpful And Generous -- Science Daily

The investigators found complementary results across the disciplines:

• Empirical data within anthropology suggests there is more cooperation among religious societies than the non-religious, especially when group survival is under threat
• Economic experiments indicate that religiosity increases levels of trust among participants
• Psychology experiments show that thoughts of an omniscient, morally concerned God reduce levels of cheating and selfish behaviour
  

"This type of religiously-motivated 'virtuous' behaviour has likely played a vital social role throughout history," says Shariff, a Psychology PhD student. Shariff adds, "One reason we now have large, cooperative societies may be that some aspects of religion - such as outsourcing costly social policing duties to all-powerful Gods - made societies work more cooperatively in the past." Across cultures and through time, observe the authors, the notion of an all-powerful, morally concerned "Big God" usually begat "Big groups" -large-scale, stable societies that successfully passed on their cultural beliefs.

The study also points out that in today's world religion has no monopoly on kind and generous behaviour. In many findings, non-believers acted as prosocially as believers. The last several hundred years has seen the rise of non-religious institutional mechanisms that include effective policing, courts and social surveillance. "Some of the most cooperative modern societies are also the most secular," says Norenzayan. "People have found other ways to be cooperative - without God."