Those examining religious cognition should not conflate religion with the belief in God. Research published in the November issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has demonstrated that religion and God have different and distinct effects on prosocial behavior.
In three studies, Jesse Lee Preston and Ryan S. Ritter University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that thinking about religious concepts made people more likely to help those within their own social group, while thinking about God made people more likely to help outsiders. This was true even of people who didn’t believe in God and were not affiliated with a religion.
The study sought to explain some inconsistencies regarding the relationship between religious priming and prosocial behavior. Previous studies have found that those exposed to religious words were more generous to a strangers and less likely to cheat. But other studies found that those exposed to religious words were more vengeful and more hostile towards outsiders.
“One reason as to why there are inconsistent effects of religious priming on prosociality may be that religion is itself comprised of different components or concepts that can shape moral concerns in different ways,” Preston and Ritter explained in their study. “Yet, religious priming studies often prime multiple religious concepts in a single condition, with the assumption that there is a unified concept of religious prosociality activated by all these words.”
In their first study, which included 203 participants, the researchers found that people tended to believe their religious leader would want them to help someone of the same religion rather than someone of another religion, but that God had the opposite preference.
In their second study, which included 88 participants, the researchers found people gave more money to a charity associated with their own religion after being asked about their religious affiliation. But participants asked about their belief in God tended to give more money to a charity not associated with their religion.
In their third study, which included 85 participants, the researchers found people exposed to the word “religion” were more likely to cooperate with someone of the same religion while playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Those exposed to the word “God,” in contrast, were more likely to cooperate with someone of a different religion.
Preston and Ritter emphasized that their research should not be overgeneralized, because the participants in the study were mostly Christian American undergraduates.
“People should be most concerned with maintaining a good moral image before God if they are worried about being punished for immoral behavior,” they wrote. “But this also assumes that one has a concept of God that is punishing and values outgroup cooperation. This particular image of God may be more prevalent among Catholics and mainline Protestants, the most common Christian denominations where these studies were conducted.”
Not everyone believes in a God that wants his or her followers to help outsiders. Some denominations of Christianity, such as Evangelicals, tend to be more hostile towards non-believers.
“For our own part, the current studies demonstrate that thoughts of God promote prosocial behavior toward those whom God wants us to help (in this case, the religious outgroup), which can sometimes be in opposition to the prosocial goals of the religious ingroup,” Preston and Ritter concluded.