He said past studies have found thinking about God is linked with higher levels of giving to strangers. But he has long wondered whether that giving is directed only toward people who are like the giver. Or will they give to people from other groups, especially groups they distrust or fear?
This study allowed researchers to look at that issue.
They found no difference in increased giving to in-groups or out-groups.
Shariff said the study is the result of two different teams of researchers working together. The two groups had different expectations for how the experiment would turn out. For his part, Shariff expected that giving to strangers from the same group would be higher than giving to people from a different group. Other researchers expected a different outcome.
“One of the problems in science is that you have to get rid of confirmation bias,” he said. “That is really hard to do when everyone believes the same thing.”
He also said asking specifically about God — rather than a religious identity — was important to the study. So researchers asked people to think about what God wanted them to do — rather than what a good member of their religious group might do.
Shariff said it is often hard to isolate the “God-bit” of religion because ethnicity and culture often play a major role in how religion is lived out.
While religious people tend to give more to both secular and faith-based charities, it’s hard to tell whether religion makes people more generous or if people who are more generous tend to join religious groups.
The study suggests that perhaps the “God-bit” part of religion isn’t to blame for anti-social behavior, he said.
That’s an important finding, said Pasek, because religion is often seen as a driver of conflict. But the reality might be more complicated. Some aspects of religion, he said, might promote more tolerance. He said that other research indicates a belief in God can “decrease the extent to which people dehumanize out-group members.”
Jeremy Ginges, a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research and one of the researchers on the project, said he wanted to test whether belief in God is associated with cooperation and benevolence across group lines.
Trading ideas across different groups is important to human beings, he said, and “it would be strange if belief in God was a barrier to such trade.”
He said the biggest takeaway was that religious diversity poses no barrier to cooperation.
“This is important because the idea that belief in God is associated with intergroup hostility is quite widespread and often used as a cudgel against immigration and against specific religious groups such as Muslims,” he said.
This article originally appeared here.
