Religious situations boost prosociality more than personal devotion does

Evidence

Erik Duhaime approached shopkeepers in Marrakech, Morocco, and asked them to choose one of the following three options: (1) I give you 20 dirhams (about $2.50); (2) I give charity 60 dirhams; or (3) I give you 10 dirhams and charity 30 dirhams. (This is yet another version of the Dictator Game, discussed earlier.) Critically, sometimes he approached them during the Muslim call to prayer, sometimes not. When the call to prayer was being sounded out from minarets throughout the city, 100 percent of the shopkeepers chose option 2, the most charitable option, compared to only around 60 percent of shopkeepers when he asked at times when the call to prayer was not audible. … In another field experiment, Dimitris Xygalatas went further and compared the relative effects of religious situations and religious dispositions on selfish behavior. He randomly assigned Hindu participants in Mauritius to play an economic game either in a religious setting (a temple) or in a comparable secular setting (a restaurant). Participants were given the opportunity to withdraw from a shared pool of money that otherwise would benefit the entire group. He found that participants who played the game in the temple withdrew 170 rupees, compared to 231 rupees on average when playing in the restaurant. Prior to the field experiment, participants had rated their intensity of religiosity. How religiously involved participants said they were had little bearing on how much money they withdrew from the shared pool—only the situation where they played mattered. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 154

In a recent statistical analysis of all known religious priming studies, we found that religious priming reliably increases prosocial behavior for believers, but the effect was inconsistent and unreliable overall for non-believers (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, unpublished data). — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 713

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s analytical integration: the salience-of-situation effect (audible call to prayer, temple setting) is exactly the kind of mechanism that would make a public fumi-e trampling ceremony — a situation engineered for maximum salience — override disposition in Rodrigues’ context.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core claim that public ritual (fumi-e) can disrupt partner choice and solidarity regardless of individual belief strength — situational priming over disposition is the mechanism. — connects to: Witnessing an intense ritual boosts prosociality as much as participating in it; Personal religiosity does not predict generosity in experiments.; Religious identity alone does not make people more charitable (+8 more)
• QUESTION: The ‘only the situation mattered’ result is striking — worth verifying whether later replications found trait-religiosity or belief-strength interactions in priming paradigms.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 154; Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 713

Broader Connections

• Prosocial behavior has multiple secular sources beyond religion #qualifies (0.82)