Religious situations, but not beliefs, help foster trust

[Update: I fired a couple of questions to Shariff about this paper – you can read his response here]

In this week’s Science Magazine there’s a review of the prosocial effects of religion from an evolutionary perspective. It’s pretty radical for a journal like Science to carry this kind of review, and a few the newspapers have picked up on it too – The Guardian (Religion helps foster trust, say psychologists) and the Daily Mail (Religious people are ‘more helpful, honest and generous’ say scientists), for example. Perhaps surprisingly, the newspapers get it broadly right. But there’s some nuances there that really need to be clarified, and also what’s not clear from the reports is that there is a wild leap of logic in the hypothesis presented in the review – a leap of faith, if you will. So, what does it actually say?

The authors are Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff, from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who have conducted some key studies in understanding religiosity (see this earlier blog post).

An important part of their review is exploding a few persistent myths about the actual effect religiosity has on proscocial behaviour. First off, it doesn’t make you kinder or more empathic. Religion does not, in fact, stimulate people to help their fellow humans. As an example of this, they give the classic 1973 experiment in which students passed by a person appearing to be sick and in need of assistance. It was an anonymous set-up – as far as the students knew, no-one would ever know what they did. And religiosity had no effect on whether they offered help.

More evidence comes from a study on volunteering. When participants were lead to believe that they were unlikely to be called upon to do anything if they volunteered, then there was a big difference in favour of the religious. When participants were lead to believe they probably would be asked to actually do something, the difference disappeared. In other words, religion appears to increase your concern about how you appear to others, but doesn’t make you any more altruistic.

Another thing: self-reports of religiosity are also no guide to actual behaviour. Religious people are more likely to claim that they are honest than non-religious people, but when you study them it turns out that there is no difference. This is largely because religious people are have convinced themselves that they are nice (they are religious, after all), and so that’s what they’ll tell you if asked:

Psychologists have long known that self-reports of socially desirable behaviors (such as charitability) may not be accurate, reflecting instead impression management or self-deception … Supporting this hypothesis, psychological research summarizing many studies has found that measures of religiosity are positively associated with tests of socially desirable responding, a common human tendency to project an overly positive image of oneself in evaluative contexts.

The evidence for this comes from lab studies, such as that Norenzayan & Shariff’s own work as well as the one by Randolph-Seng and Nielsen. In these lab studies, when unprompted by any cues, religious people are just as likely to cheat and play nasty as are the non-religious.

So what then does religion do that inspired those headlines? Norenzayan & Shariff reckon that the primary effect of religion is to foster trust within groups:

One possibility holds that the greater prosociality of the religious is driven by an empathic motive to ameliorate the condition of others. Alternatively, prosocial behavior could be driven by egoistic motives, such as projecting a prosocial image or avoiding guilt (failing to live up to one’s prosocial self-image). The preponderance of the evidence supports the latter explanation.

The evidence for this? Well, when you prime people with religious prompts, they behave more honestly. They argue on these grounds that religiosity equates to trust and that, if you can spot individuals who are religious, then that might be a really handy way of identifying people that you can trust.

The big problem here, and one that they acknowledge, is that it’s easy to fake it. It’s easy to act religious and yet have no strong religious beliefs. And this is where the bizarre rituals demanded by religion come in. Perhaps these are so costly that it’s simply not worth faking them. In fact, so the argument goes, those religions that demand the most costly rituals indicate the most trustworthy individuals. As evidence, they cite a study showing that religious communes in 19th century America survived for longer than secular ones, and what’s more those religious communes that had the most arduous demands were the ones that lasted longest (Sosis and Bressler, 2003). What’s more there was no relationship between behavioural commitment and longevity in the secular communes – although the strength of this conclusion is somewhat weakened by the fact that the secular communes generally required less commitment (they were less bonkers).

In other words, this is the green beard argument. Religious ritual isn’t beneficial in itself, but it acts as a marker of trustworthy individuals. But really the problems with this line of argument are immense.

Firstly, the lab studies show that it isn’t self belief about religiosity that drives pro-social behaviour, but religious primes in the environment. What’s more, they show that secular primes work just as well as religious ones, and that religious primes work just as well for non-believers as they do for believers. It’s not religiosity that triggers pro-social behaviour, but rather reminding people that they ought to be nice. So it’s religious environments that can increase trust, not religious beliefs. And so behaviour that indicates your religious belief cannot be a marker of trustworthiness.

Then too, costly signals decrease the net benefit for freeloaders, but they decrease the net benefit for believers just as much. The only way the signal theory could work is if there is a some kind signal that freeloaders cannot fake. And anyone who’s watched a telly evangelist in action knows that this simply is not true.

Nevertheless, the Sosis and Bressler study did show that there is something special about strict religions. But this study was looking at small communities which are inherently different from the wider world. The real-world implications are unclear.

So did religion develop as a way of increasing in-group trust? Well perhaps. But it only does so under a few restricted circumstances. The authors conclude:

The preponderance of the evidence points to religious prosociality being a bounded phenomenon. Religion’s association with prosociality is most evident when the situation calls for maintaining a favorable social reputation within the ingroup. When thoughts of morally concerned deities are cognitively salient, an objectively anonymous situation becomes nonanonymous and, therefore, reputationally relevant, or alternatively, such thoughts activate prosocial tendencies because
of a prior mental association. This could occur when such thoughts are induced experimentally or in naturalistic religious situations, such as when people attend religious services or engage in ritual performance. This explains why the religious situation is more important than the religious disposition in predicting prosocial behavior.

On a final note, they point out that although this effect may have had evolutionary advantages, the meaningfulness to the modern world is unclear. For example, they note that active members of modern secular organizations are at least as likely to donate to charity as active members of religious ones. And remember that secular primes had as much effect on honesty as religious ones…

And here’s the real issue for humanists. The question is not whether religion leads to better individuals, but whether it leads to better societies. If religion fosters trust, then why is it that the countries with the lowest levels of religion also have the lowest levels of corruption? Maybe religion helped our neolithic ancestors to stick together in the face of adversity, but has pretty much outlived its usefulness now.

References

A. Norenzayan, A. F. Shariff (2008). The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality Science, 322 (5898), 58-62 DOI: 10.1126/science.1158757

Richard Sosis, Eric R. Bressler (2003). Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion Cross-Cultural Research, 37 (2), 211-239 DOI: 10.1177/1069397103037002003