(When) are religious people nicer? Religious salience and the “Sunday Effect” on pro-social behavior

By Deepak Malhotra. Judgment and Decision Making, 2008

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Health, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cccd0804d065c2ff291280c1b4bd1da04cf455cc

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: a case study from Mauritius (2013, methodology): “, 2005; Soler, 2012), most others show that such a correlation is either nonexistent (Anderson, Mellor, & Milyo, 2010; Batson, Oleson, & Weeks, 1989; Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993; Darley & Batson, 1973; Eckel & Grossman, 2004; Grossman & Parrett, 2011; Johansson-Stenman, Mahmud, & Martinsson, ”
Awe Activates Religious and Spiritual Feelings and Behavioral Intentions (2012, background): “For instance, religious people were found to be charitable on Sunday but not on weekdays (Malhotra, 2010); and, extension of prosociality to people in need occurred after activation of a religious but not a secular context (Pichon & Saroglou, 2009).”
Evolutionary accounts of belief in supernatural punishment: a critical review (2011, background): “…the disbelieving (Mazar, Amir & Ariely, 2008); (2) The sensitivity to context of cooperation among the religiously committed (Darley & Batson, 1973; Malhotra, 2010); (3) The strong alignment of cognitive states (both declarative and ‘‘embodied’’) to ritual events in anonymous populations…”
Giving from a distance: Putting the charitable organization at the center of the donation appeal (2013, background): “Prior research on appeal effectiveness has found that charitable appeals that evoke personal nostalgia, religious feelings, or empathy and self-efficacy have positive effects on people's donation intentions (Basil, Ridgway, & Basil, 2008; Ford & Merchant, 2010; Malhotra, 2010).”