Explaining Religion (EXREL)
Funded by a research grant from the European Commission
Wrath of God: Religious Primes and Punishment
Ryan
1,2
McKay ,
1
Charles
1
Efferson ,
Harvey
2
Whitehouse
& Ernst
1
Fehr
Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zürich
2 Centre for Anthropology and Mind, University of Oxford
INTRODUCTION & RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The LORD is a jealous God, filled with vengeance and wrath… (Nahum 1:2)
Religion carries formidable costs. For example, religious rituals are often
physically taxing and painful, and frequently require the sacrifice of precious
resources. Given such costs, some evolutionary theorists argue that religion must
provide countervailing adaptive benefits. Perhaps the most influential of such
proposals is that religion is a cultural variant that confers a selective advantage
at the group level by virtue of the fact that it secures and promotes prosocial
behaviour within the group (e.g., Wilson, 2002; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008).
Priming Episode: There were 4 between-subjects priming treatments, Religion
(primes: divine, holy, pious, religious), Punishment (revenge, punish, penalty,
retribution), Religion-Punishment (divine, revenge, pious, punish) and Control
(northeast, acoustic, tractor, carton). The priming episode comprised 20 priming
trials. The sequence of events for each trial was as follows (see Figure): fixation
point for 500ms, forward mask for 500ms, prime for 40ms, then backward mask
for 500ms. Four primes were presented in the priming episode, as per the
relevant priming treatment. These four primes were presented in a fixed
sequence that was repeated five times (1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4).
One possibility is that religion directly promotes first-order prosociality and
provides a deterrent against first-order free riding. Recent studies indicate that,
relative to control participants, participants primed with religious concepts are
more cooperative (Shariff and Norenzayan, 2007) and less dishonest (RandolphSeng and Nielsen, 2007).
An additional possibility, however, is that religion promotes second-order
prosociality. In this case religion may cause people to be more likely to enforce
first-order prosocial behaviour by punishing first-order transgressions.
Religious priming appears to attenuate first-order selfishness – but does it also
promote the punishment of such selfishness (‘altruistic punishment’; Fehr &
Gaechter, 2002)? In the present study we sought to investigate this issue. Our
research questions were threefold: 1) Would participants primed with the
concepts of religion and/or punishment punish more in a punishment game? 2)
Would such primes influence altruistic punishment only, or punishment in
general (both altruistic and antisocial)? 3) Would effects interact with the
individual religiosity of the participants and/or with tendencies to support
religious organizations?
METHOD
Prime visibility check: This comprised 25 forced-choice priming episodes, each
of which involved five presentations (five trials) of a single prime. All mask and
presentation parameters were as per the earlier priming episode. At the end of
each priming episode participants were required to select from a list the word
they thought had been presented in that episode. 25 points were awarded for
each correct response. We excluded any participants performing above chance
on this task.
RESULTS & CONCLUSION
We ran separate analyses for two dependent variables (see Table for the first):
1. Altruistic punishment (amount of punishment of the relatively unfair choice [590,60])
2. Antisocial punishment (amount of punishment of the relatively fair choice [150,150])
304 participants were tested in groups of 32, 34 or 36, and played a two-stage
punishment game. Between the two stages of the game all participants
underwent a subliminal priming episode, and at the completion of the second
stage of the game a procedure designed to check prime visibility. Finally,
participants filled out questionnaires to collect demographic information and
information about religious affiliation, beliefs and practices. The latter
questionnaire included a series of Likert items and a single yes/no item: “In the
past year, did you donate to a religious organization?”
Punishment Game Stage 1: Participants
were randomly assigned the role of
either Participant A or Participant B. In
the first stage, A chose an allocation of
proposed payoffs (presented in points, 1
point ≈ US $0.27) to herself and B. Two
options were presented for A to choose
between, a fair option (150,150) and an
unfair option (590,60). In each option the
value on the left indicated the share of
A, and the value on the right indicated
the share of B.
Punishment Game Stage 2: In the
second stage of the game B was
informed of the options that had been
available to A in the first stage. For each
option, B could spend points out of her
allocation share in order to reduce A’s
payoff in that case - i.e., to punish A. B
made this choice separately for each of
the two options that were available to A.
A maximum of 50 points (and minimum
of 0) could be spent in this way, i.e., B
entered a number between 0 and 50 for
each of the two options. Each point
spent by B reduced the payoff of A by 3
points - provided that the relevant
choice was actually made by A.
Our most interesting effect was a significant interaction between religious
donations and the Religion priming treatment for altruistic punishment:
participants who reported donating to a religious organization in the previous
year were more affected by Religion primes, punishing much more in response
to these primes than those who reported not donating. There were no
significant effects for antisocial punishment.
Insofar as primes increase the salience of social categories of which one is a
member, these results indicate that religion promotes punishment of social
defectors. Those who support religious institutions financially are more willing
to incur a cost to punish selfish individuals when religious concepts are
activated.
REFERENCES
Fehr, E., & Gaechter, S. (2002). Nature, 415, 137-140; Norenzayan, A., & Shariff, A. F. (2008). Science,
322, 58-62; Randolph-Seng, B., & Nielsen, M. E. (2007). Int J Psych Rel, 17(4), 303-315; Shariff, A. F.,
& Norenzayan, A. (2007). Psychological Science, 18(9), 803-809; Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s
cathedral: Evolution, religion and the nature of society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.