Universal Love or One True Religion? Experimental Evidence of the Ambivalent Effect of Religious Ideas on Altruism and Discrimination

Abstract

Contrary to the expectations of secularization theory, religion remains socially important and affects politics in multiple ways—especially regarding conflict between religious communities. Theoretically, religion can increase altruism, but belief in the superiority of one's faith may facilitate intergroup discrimination and related conflict. Previous findings remain inconclusive, however, as specific religious ideas have hardly been tested. In this article, we argue that the content of religious ideas has causal effects on intergroup discrimination. We hence test the impact of two opposing, prominent religious ideas on altruism and discrimination: universal love and the notion of one true religion. Conducting dictator games with Christians and Muslims in Ghana and Tanzania, we find causal effects: Whereas the idea of one true religion increases intergroup discrimination, that of universal love fosters equal treatment. The policy implications hereof are obvious—promoting tolerant religious ideas seems crucial to avoiding conflict.

The effects of Jesus and God on pro-sociality and discrimination

“…These results support the growing evidence that differential effects can result from different God-concepts (Johnson et al, 2013;DeBono et al, 2017) and different religious ideas (Hoffmann et al, 2019). However, further research is needed for a fuller understanding of how alternative God-concepts determine economic behaviour.…”

“…More generally, this paper adds to our understanding of the ways religions influence economic behaviour, and thus contributes to a growing academic debate on the economics of religious 'believing and belonging' (McCleary and Barro, 2019). It builds upon and supports existing evidence (Johnson et al 2013;Preston and Ritter 2013;DeBono et al 2017;Hoffmann et al 2019) that the effects of religions are complex and multifaceted. It appears that not only can the impact on economic behaviour of believing in a religion differ from that of belonging to the religion (Preston and Ritter 2013), but also that the behavioural impacts of belief depend upon which particular element of it is salient.…”

“…Preston and Ritter (2013) demonstrated that priming Christian subjects to think about their religious affiliation resulted in ingroup-favouritism in charitable giving, while priming them to think about God led instead to out-group favouritism, suggesting that while the institution of Christianity may promote parochialism, its belief system may in fact mitigate it. 3 More specifically regarding beliefs, Hoffmann et al (2019) found that priming the concept of 'one true religion' increased discrimination relative to priming the association of religion with universal love. This paper builds on this previous literature in separately exploring the effects of different belief concepts within the same religion on group discrimination.…”

Unequal treatment toward copartisans versus non-copartisans is reduced when partisanship can be falsified

“…People are generally more prosocial toward those with whom they share a group identity, whether that identity is based on race or ethnicity [1][2][3][4], nationality [5], organizational membership [6,7], or some other trait, like religion [8,9]. Even identities induced by researchers are associated with unequal treatment across groups [10][11][12].…”

Rethinking African Studies: Four Challenges and the Case for Comparative African Studies

“…Since the ground-breaking study by Wantchekon (2003) on clientelism in election campaigns in Benin, experimental studies have increasingly addressed African cases -and not only in terms of politics (e.g. Hoffmann et al, 2019;Mbiti et al, 2019).…”