Tanmoy Das, Christina Ehrich, Claudia Keser Blum and Dudley (2001), in their effort to explain urban growth in early modern Europe, lend support to Weber’s view that Christian denominations shaped behavioral differences. Consistently, Benjamin et al. (2016) find in an experimental setting that religious priming increases public-good contributions among Protestants while decreasing them among Catholics. Generally, the existing literature reports mixed evidence on the effects of religious priming on prosocial behavior in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Many questions remain open regarding the primary drivers of individual cooperative behavior—whether it is identification with a religious denomination, participation in religious activities, parental religious affiliation, spirituality, or related factors. We present a laboratory experiment (with 183 students of the University of Goettingen) that employs a novel religious priming method based on artist identification: participants viewed either 15th-century religious paintings or 19th-century abstract paintings, with or without access to a group-chat option. We control for individuals’ religious affiliation, religiosity, spirituality, religious activities, economic preferences, and demographics to identify which dimensions of religious closeness, spirituality, and economic preferences influence prosocial behavior in a one-shot voluntary contribution game and a lying task. We find no significant effect of religious priming on behavior in either game. However, religiosity, spirituality, and participation in religious activities jointly lead to a significant decrease in voluntary contributions. Moreover, while females contribute significantly less than males on average, the negative effect of the “religiosity” principal component is primarily driven by males. Religiosity also increases the extent of self-serving lying. In addition, self-serving lying is amplified by a principal component with positive loadings on negative reciprocity and belief in karma, and negative loadings on trust and inclusion of self in others. By contrast, such lying is reduced by a principal component with positive loadings on civic duty, shame, and guilt. Finally, we find that parental religion significantly affects lying behavior: self-serving lying decreases when at least one parent adheres to a religion. Only 58% of the students indicate an affiliation with at a religion, mostly Christianity. 39% indicate that they do not feel affiliated with any religion, 3% indicate that they do not know. It is thus not surprising that we don’t observe any behavioral impact of the students’ religious affiliation per se. Still, the parents’ affiliation seems to matter. Indeed, 79% of the parents are attributed a religious denomination. This obvious shift in society warrants further investigation.
RELIGIOSITY, SPIRITUALITY, ECONOGRAPHICS AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN GERMANY
ABSTRACT
