Psychology & Religion
Religion and Ethical Behavior from a Psychological Perspective
Empirical studies on the relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior.
Unable to find work and struggling to support his family, a young Danny Thomas began to pray to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of desperate causes. He promised that if St. Jude helped him, Thomas would build a shrine in his honor. Soon after, he began to find jobs in entertainment and became very successful. To fulfill his promise to St. Jude, Thomas founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help sick children heal without financially crippling their families.
Thomas is but one of the many instances of religious individuals displaying prosocial behaviors; numerous religious traditions have been grounded in ethical principles such as compassion and forgiveness, influencing followers and resulting in the creation of hospitals, homeless shelters, and charities (Hardy, 2013). Although many religious individuals have done good deeds, it is still unclear if this behavior is because of religious beliefs.
This is an empirical question that can be explored through research in psychology. In such studies, researchers often measure the impact of religion on behavior through religiosity, the centrality or salience of religion in an individual’s life, which is the culmination of religious doctrine, practice, and experience (Huber & Huber, 2012).
The connection between religiosity and ethical behavior seems straightforward: religious doctrine emphasizes the importance of living a moral life, and it follows that those who follow religious teachings would strive to live as ethically as possible. When examining the emergent research, however, there are contradictory findings. On one hand, some studies suggest that there is a positive relationship between religiosity and virtuous personality traits such as compassion and empathy, perceptions of the benevolence of others, and adaptive traits like lower levels of depression (e.g., Furrow et al., 2004; Saroglou et al., 2005; Tiggemann & Hage, 2019).
On the other hand, studies have indicated that religious situational factors play a greater role in influencing behavior than religiosity itself. Religious priming, for instance, is when a religious stimulus (e.g., a Bible quote) is exposed to someone before measuring a behavior (e.g., donations). Religious priming may play a greater role in mediating behavior than religiosity itself (Boytos & Pettijohn, 2017; Gilad & Stepanova, 2015). As an example, Aveyard (2014) found that when Muslim students heard the Islamic call to prayer, it decreased rates of cheating. Similarly, research by Pichon et al. (2007) indicated that religious words such as “parish” increased willingness to help others.
Furthermore, research has been performed that compared the effects of religious situational factors (including priming) versus religiosity on ethical behavior. Randolph-Seng and Nielsen (2007) used a word-unscrambling task to investigate the impact of religious priming on cheating likelihood, finding that priming led to less cheating and that this effect was unrelated to religiosity levels. Similarly, Shariff and Norenzayan (2007) exposed participants to religious or secular priming and found that those exposed to religion-related words allocated more money to anonymous strangers — but again this effect was unrelated to a self-reported measure of religiosity. Xygalatas et al. (2016) utilized a naturalistic design to study the impact of religious settings on charitable giving and found that being in a religious building increased donations, but these were unrelated to religiosity scores, suggesting a context-dependent effect.
Thus, these studies suggest that religious situational variables, such as religious location or priming, may impact ethical behavior irrespective of religiosity. In other words, self-reported religious engagement or orientation may have little predictive value regarding ethical behavior. This claim should be scrutinized and interpreted cautiously, as research on religion and ethical behavior has several shortcomings.
First, past studies have had poor construct validity (the extent to which a test or questionnaire is measuring what it claims to) when measuring religiosity. For example, some previous studies used vague measures of religious involvement or single item measures (e.g., Brooks, 2003, defined a “religious group” as the respondents who reported attending religious services weekly or more frequently), failing to incorporate the complex factors that contribute to religious identity and moral character. Another issue in the research is a lack of external validity, or the ability to generalize results from a study to other situations or groups of people. Laboratory investigations on prosocial behavior and moral decision-making often rely on contrived fictional scenarios or economic games. As an example, Trémolière and Bonnefon (2014) presented participants with a scenario in which they had to decide if it were morally permissible to save 500 people by killing a crying baby. Such scenarios lack applicability to real life and therefore generalizability. Finally, because religiosity is a trait that varies naturally and cannot be randomly assigned to different study participants in an experiment, claims about the causal relationship between religiosity and ethical behavior will remain unclear.
