13:30 - 15:00
Room: Floor 2, Room 217, Nature House
Chair/s:
Scott Dickinson
Scott Dickinson - The Hot Hand Effect in Low Base Rate Environments
Miguel Abellan - If I don‘t buy it, someone else will: Social responsibility and the replacement logic
Mathew Creighton - New liars or new lies: Compositional and attitudinal change in strategically masked controversial sentiment
Bing Jiang - Are Christians More Forgiving and Less Greedy? Evidence from a Power-to-take Game Experiment
Simon Dato - Reciprocity: On the Relative Importance and Interaction of Intention and Outcome Effects
Are Christians More Forgiving and Less Greedy? Evidence from a Power-to-take Game Experiment
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Presented by: Bing Jiang
Bing Jiang
Department of Economics & Business, Virginia Military Institute, USA
A substantial amount of literature has demonstrated that religious beliefs and practices foster prosocial attitudes and behaviors such as generosity, altruism, cooperation and care for others. Despite promising advancements of knowledge in understanding the relationship between religion and prosocial attitudes and behaviors, little effort has been made to study how religion is linked to negative reciprocity and antisocial behaviors. In this paper, I investigate whether and how Christian belief is linked to decision-making in a two-player power-to-take game experiment. I recruit 714 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) to conduct an online power-to-take game experiment combined with surveys. I find that overall, participants who possess a genuine Christian belief tend to take less resources and also destroy less resources when exposed to potential resource extraction from others than those who do not have the Christian belief, regardless of their counterparts’ religious background - that is, Christians are indeed less “greedy” and more “forgiving” than non-Christians. Interestingly, the trait of negative reciprocity is statistically significant in explaining antisocial interactions: participants who score high on negative reciprocity are more likely to take resources from others and destroy their own resources. These findings have implications for understanding the effect of religious beliefs on decision-making and antisocial behaviors.