The Cult of Theoi: Economic Uncertainty and Religion

Paul Frijters and Juan Barón

No 4902, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards "Theoi" in the laboratory. The theory we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal contract with the source of uncertainty by sacrificing towards it. In our experiments, we create the situation whereby individuals face an uncertain economic payback due to "Theoi" and we allow participants to sacrifice towards this entity. Aggregate sacrifices amongst participants are over 30% of all takings, increase with the level of humanistic labelling of Theoi and decrease when participants share information or when the level of uncertainty is lower. The findings imply that under circumstances of high uncertainty people are willing to sacrifice large portions of their income even when this has no discernable effect on outcomes.

Keywords: sacrifice; religion; uncertainty; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2010-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Economic Record, 2012, 88, 116-136

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4902.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Cult of Theoi: Economic Uncertainty and Religion (2012)
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:iza:izadps:dp4902

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().