Religious people exaggerate their attendance and charity in self-reports.

Evidence

These survey findings can be found in Brooks, 2006, and in Putnam and Campbell, 2010. These findings are correlational, and therefore cannot tell us about causal direction. Moreover, they are based on self-reports of religious attendance, belief, and charitability. However, whether consciously or unconsciously, survey respondents may inflate their frequency of church attendance, as well as the number of charitable acts they engage in. What’s more troubling, these tendencies are especially exaggerated among more religious people. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 702

Categorization

• XREF: A confound the reader must weigh when testing the Big-God prosociality claim against self-reported data; parallels how reputational display—not genuine devotion—may drive the trampling-ritual solidarity.