Are Christians More Forgiving and Less Greedy? Evidence from a Power-to-take Game Experiment
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Presented by: Bing Jiang
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.