Religion, Context, and Constraint toward Strangers

John Orbell, Marion Goldman, Matthew Mulford and Robyn Dawes
Additional contact information
John Orbell: University of Oregon
Marion Goldman: University of Oregon
Matthew Mulford: University of Oregon
Robyn Dawes: Carnegie Mellon University

Rationality and Society, 1992, vol. 4, issue 3, 291-307

Abstract: Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoner's dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon—contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which one religious group dominates that context. There were three major findings: a widespread belief, shared equally by religious and nonreligious people, that religious people will cooperate more than nonreligious people; no relationship, in fact, between religious affiliation and cooperation; and an increase of cooperation with church attendance but only among Mormons in Logan. Consistent with standard experimental method, subjects in these experiments were assigned to experimental treatments randomly, meaning that the people they confronted were randomly met strangers. It is proposed that involvement with a religious institution will constrain behavior toward strangers only when the religious group dominates the ecology—and when there is, therefore, a high probability that such a randomly met stranger shares one's own religious affiliation.

Date: 1992
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463192004003004 (text/html)

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:sae:ratsoc:v:4:y:1992:i:3:p:291-307

DOI: 10.1177/1043463192004003004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().