The effect of subtle religious representations on cooperation

Ali Ahmed and Mats Hammarstedt ()

International Journal of Social Economics, 2011, vol. 38, issue 11, 900-910

Abstract: Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate how subtle religious representations affect prosocial behavior. The authors study the impact of religious representations on prosocial behavior in terms of cooperation in a one‐shot/three‐person public goods game. Design/methodology/approach - The authors used the scrambled sentence task to prime participants with religious words before they were asked to make a one‐shot/three‐person public goods game decision. Findings - Both in the raw data and when controlling for factors such as age, gender and religious beliefs, the authors found that priming of religious representations increased cooperation in the experiment, that is, increased contributions to the public good. The authors found no significant interaction effects between priming and self‐reported measures of religiosity, suggesting that the priming effect was present among both self‐reported religious and nonreligious participants. Self‐reported measures of religiosity were not correlated with cooperation in this study. Originality/value - The paper adds to the growing body of experimental economics literature that has studied self‐reported measures of religiosity alongside behavior in different economic games. This study contributes to the literature by examining the effect of subtle influences of religion on cooperation. Also, in contrast to previous economic literature, the paper examines the direct impact of religion as an independent variable on cooperation.

Keywords: Individual behaviour; Semantics; Consumer behaviour; Influence; Religion; Cooperation; Public goods game; Experiment; Priming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:eme:ijsepp:v:38:y:2011:i:11:p:900-910

DOI: 10.1108/03068291111171405

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Social Economics is currently edited by Professor Terence Garrett

More articles in International Journal of Social Economics from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().