Preference Transmission within Churches: Religious Leaders and Clusters of (In)Tolerance

Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Eric Ochieng

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: Animosity towards followers of other faiths fuels inter-group conflicts. In order to study the role of religious leaders in shaping pro-sociality within their churches, we directly elicit a rich set of ingroup-out-group biases among pastors (N=200) and members of their churches (N=800) in Kenya, using controlled allocation tasks. We document remarkable heterogeneity in preferences across religious leaders, with one type treating all recipients equally independently of their religious beliefs and the second type severely discriminating against Muslims and non-religious individuals. In line with cultural transmission models, we find that: (i) pastors aim to instill their preferences in church members, (ii) church members follow leaders in an experiment that exogenously provides information about leaders’ behavior, and (iii) preferences of church members are robustly positively related to the preferences of their religious leader, especially among those with greater exposure to the leader. Together, our findings suggest that differences in preferences of religious leaders spill over and create distinct social groups with contrasting moral views how to treat out-group members.

Keywords: Religious leaders; Tolerance; Parochialism; Discrimination; Social preferences; Cultural transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D74 J15 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
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