Implicit influences of Christian religious representations on dictator and prisoner's dilemma game decisions

Ali M. Ahmed and Osvaldo Salas

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2011, vol. 40, issue 3, 242-246

Abstract: We investigate how implicit influences of Christian religious representations affect prosociality. We examine the direct impact of religion as an independent variable on prosocial behavior. We do so by priming participants with religious words in a scrambled sentence task before they make a dictator game and a prisoner's dilemma game decision. Priming religious words significantly increased prosocial behavior in both games: participants in the treatment group were more generous and cooperative than participants in the control group. The priming effect was present regardless of participants' self-reported religiosity. Self-reported religiosity was not correlated with generosity or cooperation.

Keywords: Religion; Priming; Dictator; game; Prisoner'; s; dilemma; game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W5H ... aca429bde3fd7a2d8811
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:40:y:2011:i:3:p:242-246

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().