Religious Prosociality
Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff (”The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality“; .pdf file here) analyzed 3 decades of empirical evidence looking for examples of religious prosociality (”the idea that religions facilitate acts that benefit others at a personal cost”). They found that religion encourages prosociality because the sense of being watched makes believers nervous about being selfish.
A study by Melissa Bateson & Gilbert Roberts (”Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting”; .pdf file here) found that just being under the gaze of eyes on a poster nearly tripled the contributions to an office coffee kitty.
Exposing participants in a laboratory economic game by Daniel Fessler to computer-generated eyespots while they played made them twice as generous as those who were not (”Nobody’s watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game“).
A study by Kevin McCabe & Vernon Smith found that participants in a laboratory economic game were nearly 4 times stingier with other players when they thought they were anonymous than when they thought they were being observed (”Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games”; .pdf file here).
In an experiment by Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle (”Religious Ritual and Cooperation: Testing for a Relationship on Israeli Religious and Secular Kibbutzim”; .pdf file here), two players would simultaneously decide how much money to withdraw from the same envelope — if their combined withdrawals exceeded the amount in the envelope, neither would get any money. Systematically, less money was withdrawn when the game was played at religious kibbutzim than when it was played at secular kibbutzim.
In a 1989 study (Religious prosocial motivation: Is it altruistic or egoistic?“), volunteers were given the option to raise money for a sick child’s medical bills. Some would-be volunteers were told that it was very likely that they would be asked to help, while others were told that there was only a small chance that they would be called on. Only in the latter situation was a link between religiosity and volunteering evident. Religion played a role when it appeared that volunteering would improve one’s reputation without much personal cost.
In an experiment by Jesse Bering (”The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural“), when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test.
Brandon Randolph-Seng & Michael Nielsen report (”Honesty: One Effect of Primed Religious Representations“) that when experimental subjects were primed with religious words, they cheated significantly less on a subsequent task.
A cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies (”Belief in moralizing gods”; .pdf file here) by Frans Roes suggests that the larger a society, the more likely its members believe in deities that are concerned about human morality. In small hunter-gatherer bands or subsistence farming villages, it’s easy to keep track of how cooperative your neighbors are. But when groups grow, an all-seeing deity may help watch and punish.