Religious priming produces generosity biased toward ingroup members

Evidence

Azim Shariff and I tested this idea in the well-known Dictator Game. This time, we invited Christian Canadians to choose to transfer money to another player in an anonymous setting. In one condition, they were led to think the other player was Muslim. In a second condition, they thought the other player was a fellow Christian. And finally, in a third, control condition, no information was given about the other player. If Christian folk were good theologians, they would follow Christian doctrine and be “Good Samaritans,” being generous equally with everyone. But they were not. Christian participants primed with thoughts of God were most generous toward the Christian receiver, less generous toward a stranger with unknown religious affiliation, and least generous toward the Muslim receiver (playing with a Muslim receiver was the equivalent of not being primed with religious words). While this result is not exactly an indication of intense hostility toward religious outgroups, it does show that making supernatural monitoring salient does lead to a discriminant form of generosity that is sensitive to group boundaries. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 526

Categorization

• XREF: Central experimental evidence for the analytical project: shows Big God monitoring creates group-discriminant cooperation that Japanese authorities could exploit and invert. — connects to: Collectivist frames pair in-group generosity with out-group competition as one package. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 1025