Relijion And Prosocial Behavior

Religion has been an important component of human socioculture.It keeps shaping the culture and it is being shaped by it.Meanwhile,it is of particular complexity since it is interrelated with the history and facts of important aspects of human society such as politics,economy and nationalities.For a long time,religion has attracted the attention and studies of an increasing number of economists because of two factors,which are religious value and religious organization,both of them act as critical variables in economic analysis and they affect the behaviors of people in their economic life,and then economic output is affected too.The macro-economic analysis of religion studies the relationship between religious believers and economic development in a society;the religious rational choice theory adopts classical economics to construct a religious market model and it explains a variety of phenomena such as the motives,behaviors and benefits of people who are religious believers from a micro level under the premise of rational choice.In recent years,economists started using the newly emerged behavioral experiment to study the influence of religion on various prosocial behaviors of individuals in order to further explore the micro paths and mechanism of the influence of religion on economy.In comparison with foreign studies,the studies on religious economics are still very much limited in China,and there are no experimental economics studies related to religion;furthermore,there are many differences between China's diffused religious situations and the systematic religious situations in other countries.Based on the situations of Chinese society,believers of relatively popular religions in China,such as Buddhists,Christians and Muslims,are chosen as study objects in this paper,and the influence of different religions on a series of prosocial behaviors such as altruism,fairness,trust,and cooperation of subjects are studied with the methods of experimental economics in order to help people to understand the profound influencing mechanism with new research perspectives and tools,providing important references for policymakersA field experiment,which is converted from a dictator game,aultimatum game,trust game and public goods game,is designed in this paper first.On the one hand,it is good to recruit subjects in a broader range;on the other hand,bias resulted from the influence of laboratory environment on the behaviors of subjects can be avoided since the environment is changed from a laboratory to a familiar one.Then,the experiment can be done with the participation of randomly recruited Buddhists,Christians,Muslims and atheists with their identity being disclosed or concealedThe analysis of the experiment results is carried out in three levels.First of all,the influence of being religious on prosocial behaviors is studied,as in whether there are differences between the prosocial behaviors of religious believers and atheists.With the descriptive statistics and non-parametric test of the experiment results,we found out that there is no significant difference detected in the comparison between religious believers-including Buddhists,Christians and Muslims-and atheists because there are large differences among the behaviors of subjects of different identities.We also found out that the performance of Buddhists is significantly more prosocial than other subjects;while there are no large differences in the performance among Christians,Muslims and atheists as we further compared the behaviors of subjects of different religious identities.The second level of the study is the discussion of the influence of religiosity level on prosocial behaviors.The overall religiosity level of the general level of religiosity,the intrinsic and extrinsic religion are measured.With the OLS regression analysis,we found out that Buddhists have shown higher prosociality in terms of altruistic and trust behaviors than Atheists who are classified as the basic group,while there are no independent influences of Christians and Muslims in terms of altruistic and trust behaviors,and such results are often related to religiosity.The fairness of Buddhists is dependent on extrinsic religion;while the attitudes of Christians and Muslims towards fairness have no significant connections with their religious affiliation and religosity.As for cooperation,there are no significant influences on all religious identities and they are only weakly related to extrinsic religion.The third level of the study is the discussion of the influencing mechanism of religion on intergroup behaviors.With the OLS regression analysis,we found out that there are no significant intergroup behaviors shown in most experiment results.With the further analysis of the verification of the intergroup behaviors of three religions,we found out that there are large differences in their intergroup behaviors.There are no intergroup behaviors among Buddhists in all experiments;no intergroup behaviors are found among Christians in most experiments;while Muslims showed significant ingroup preferences or outgroup discrimination or both in most experiments.Such results are attributed to the differences in religious doctrines,or possibly the different development situations of foreign religions such as Christianity in China than those of them in western societies.Then,the influence factors of inter-group effects are discussed.The overall religiosity and fundamentalism are chosen as the factors that influence intergroup behaviors,which are significantly negative in the trust game experiment,indicating that the influences of the overall religiosity and fundamentalism on trust game are similar,while they lack independent influence on other prosocial behaviors.With the analysis of the influence of religiosity on intergroup behaviors of different religious subjects,we found out that the intergroup behaviors of Buddhists and Christians are basically affected by the overall religiosity,the overall religiosity promoted their intergroup behaviors.One possible explanation is that the Muslim subjects we chose are ethnic minorities who live among Han people,whose intergroup behaviors will be weakened if their fundamentalism is higher in order to live along with the ambient environment and ensure the development of their religion.