Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: a case study from Mauritius

By Dimitris Xygalatas. 2013

96 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Social scientists and folk wisdom have both claimed that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behavior, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality; however, this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviors. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviors, and these effects are evident irrespective of the degree of religiosity of the participant. Building on and combining the strengths of previous field designs, I report on the results of a field experiment in Mauritius examining the effects of religious environments on cooperation in a naturalistic setting. These results were consistent with previous findings that religious cues increase cooperation. Importantly, this effect was not dependent on degrees of prior religiosity. Plausible interpretations of such effects are discussed.

Subfields: Accounting, Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3578a90d06f13c253cbd1ae74550af61def3cb65

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In Accounting

Dimitris Xygalatas

In Demography

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The evolution of religion and morality: a synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies (2017, background): “Some notable studies (Cohen et al., 2014; Sosis & Bressler, 2003; Sosis & Ruffle, 2003; Xygalatas, 2013) have focused on non-Western samples, but are limited insofar as their samples are mono-cultural, preventing cross-cultural comparisons and generalizations.”