Prosocial Behavior 1 Running Head: God Concepts and Prosocial Behavior God is Watching You: Supernatural Agent Concepts Increase Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game

We present two studies aimed at resolving experimentally whether religion increases prosocial behavior in the anonymous dictator game. Participants allocated more money to anonymous strangers when God concepts were implicitly activated compared to neutral or no concepts. This effect was at least as large as when concepts associated with secular moral institutions were primed. Self-reported religiosity as a trait measure did not seem to be associated with prosocial behavior. We discuss different possible mechanisms that may underlie this effect, focusing on the hypotheses that the religious prime had an ideomotor effect on generosity, or that it activated a felt presence of supernatural watchers. We then discuss implications for theories positing religion as a facilitator of the emergence of early large scale societies of cooperators. Prosocial Behavior 3 God is Watching You: Supernatural Agent Concepts Increase Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game Many have suggested that the cognitive availability of omniscient and omnipresent supernatural agents has had a dramatic impact on the development of large scale human societies. The imagined presence of these agents, along with emotional ritual and costly commitment to the social group governed by these agents, may have been the major development that allowed genetically unrelated individuals to interact in cooperative ways (e.g., Irons, 1991; Sosis & Ruffle, 2004; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). This research is an experimental investigation of this link between two broad classes of culturally widespread phenomena of interest to social science and psychology—religious beliefs, and cooperative behavior among unrelated strangers. While anecdotes documenting both religion’s prosocial and antisocial effects abound, the empirical literature has produced mixed results regarding how religion is implicated in prosocial behavior. Sosis & Ruffle (2004) examined levels of generosity in an experimental cooperative pool game in religious and secular kibbutzim in Israel and found higher levels of cooperation in the religious ones, and the highest levels among religious men who engaged in daily communal prayer. Batson and colleagues (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993; Batson, Oleson, Weeks, Jennings, & Brown, 1989) have shown that while religious participants report more explicit willingness to care for others than do the non-religious, controlled laboratory measures of altruistic behavior often fail to corroborate this difference. Furthermore, when helpfulness is higher on the part of the Prosocial Behavior 4 more devoted, it is typically better explained by egoistic motives such as seeking praise or avoiding guilt, rather than by higher levels of compassion or a stronger motivation to benefit others. However insightful these findings are, research on religion and prosocial behavior has been limited by its overwhelming reliance on correlational designs. If religiosity and prosocial behavior are found to be correlated, it is just as likely that having a prosocial disposition causes one to be religious, or that some third variable such as guilt-proneness or dispositional empathy causes both cooperative behavior and religiosity, as it is that religious beliefs somehow cause prosocial behavior. Only rarely have studies actually involved inducing supernatural beliefs as a causal factor. Bering (2003; in press) inhibited 3-year-old children’s tendencies to cheat by opening a “forbidden box,” by telling them that an invisible agent – Princess Alice – is in the room with them. In a different study, college students who were casually told that the ghost of a dead graduate student had been spotted in their private testing room were less willing to cheat on a computerized spatial reasoning task than those told nothing (Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005). These studies suggest that explicit thoughts of supernatural agents curb cheating behavior. In this research, we examined the effect of God concepts specifically on selfish and prosocial behavior. We designed this research in two novel ways. First, we introduce an experimental procedure to activate God concepts implicitly, without participants consciously reflecting on these concepts; second, we use one of the most well-researched paradigms of cooperative behavior in psychology and economics, the dictator game, conducted in a strictly controlled anonymous setting with real monetary consequences. Prosocial Behavior 5 The purpose of the first study was to implicitly prime God concepts among student participants and examine how this affected their generosity. The second study replicated our main finding from the first study in a more heterogenous community sample, and compared the relative strength of the religious prime to a secular prime of social institutions enforcing morality. In the General Discussion, we explore and evaluate possible explanations for why primed thoughts of supernatural agents may promote generosity. Study One Participants Fifty (age M=21, 34 female) participants were recruited through posters at the University of British Columbia and randomly assigned to either the religious prime, or no-prime condition. Twenty-six indicated identification with a religion and 24 did not. Of the religious, 19 identified themselves as Christians, 4 as Buddhists, 2 as Jews, 1 as a Muslim. Of the remaining 24, 19 were identified as atheists, and 5 as theists without an organized religion. Participants were defined as atheists if they indicated “none” for religion, and scored below the midpoint of the scale on a question assessing belief in God. Theists were those who indicated a religion and scored higher than midpoint on the same belief measure. Procedure and Materials All participants were seated in private rooms behind closed doors for the duration of the experiment. Half of these participants received an implicit God concepts prime based on the scrambled sentence paradigm of Srull and Wyer (1979). The other half received no prime. Following this task, each participant played a non-iterated, Prosocial Behavior 6 anonymous version of the Dictator Game (Hoffman, McCabe, Shachat, & Smith, 1994) against a confederate posing as another participant. All actual participants were given the following instructions: You have been chosen as the giver in this economic decision making task. You will find 10 one dollar coins. Your role is to take and keep as many of these coins as you would like, knowing that however many you leave, if any, will be given to the receiver participant to keep. In order to free participants from reputational concerns, they were assured that their decisions would remain confidential to everyone save the other participant and that their identity would be hidden from this participant. Once they had made their decision, they completed a number of measures assessing religious belief and demographic information. Each participant was then debriefed both in writing and verbally regarding the deception and the true aims of the experiment, given their show-up compensation, thanked and dismissed. Priming God concepts. Participants were primed using the scrambled sentence method (Srull and Wyer, 1979) using the target words spirit, divine, God, sacred, and prophet. The prime required participants to unscramble ten sentences, five of which contained the target words above; and five that were neutral words unrelated to religion. Participants unscrambled each five word sentence into a four word sentence by dropping the extraneous word. For example, “felt she eradicate spirit the” would become “she felt the spirit,” and “dessert divine was fork the” would become “the desert was divine.” Results and Discussion Prosocial Behavior 7 Previous research has demonstrated that the majority of givers act selfishly in this anonymous game, leaving little or no money for the receiver, although some prosocial behavior remains even in anonymous non-iterated settings (Haley & Fessler, 2005; Hoffman et al. 1994). This selfish tendency was confirmed in our control condition. Those receiving no prime left, on average, $1.84 for the other participant, with 52% leaving $1 or less, only 12% leaving $5, and none leaving more. Those who were primed with God concepts left, on average, $4.22, with 64% leaving $5 or more and yielding a considerable difference of $2.38 (t(48)=3.69, p<.001, prep=.99, d=1.07) between the groups. Looked another way, a higher proportion of participants behaved selfishly (offering nothing) in the control condition (36%) than in the religious condition (16%), whereas a higher proportion behaved fairly (offering exactly $5) in the religious condition (52%) than in the control condition (12%), (χ(N=29)=7.5, p=.006, prep=.96), shifting the modal response from selfishness to fairness (see Figure 1). This effect was present for both theists (prime-control difference of $1.88, t(29)=2.25, p=.032, prep=.91, d=.84) and atheists (prime-control difference of $2.95, t(17)=2.70, p=.015, prep=.94, d=1.31). Although unprimed atheists left slightly less than theists, this trend was weak, and not statistically significant ($0.97, t(23)=1.34, p=.19, prep=.73). Self-reported belief in God, as a continuous measure, was not a good predictor of how much participants left in the unprimed control condition (r(24)= .23, p=.29, prep=.65). To summarize, implicit priming of God concepts did increase prosocial behavior by increasing how much participants left for an anonymous stranger. Interestingly, this effect was true for both theists and atheists. The implicit religious Prosocial Behavior 8 prime proved to be much more effective at curtailing selfish behavior than did explicit religious belief. While these conclusions are compelling, their generalizability is limited by our reliance on a student sample. The behavior of such samples in economic games can be unrepresentative of larger, more heterogeneous populations in the world (Henrich et al, 2005). Moreover, the results of this study are open to the criticism that the control group did not receive a neutral prime. Although implausible, it is conceivable that merely being primed with words, rather than the specific effect of religious concepts, may have led to the difference. Moreover, we did not specifically establish that the implicit religious prime indeed affected behavior without reflective awareness of the participants. All of these concerns were addressed in the second study. Study Two Overview The second study sought to replicate and expand the findings of the first. There were four main changes. First, instead of relying on a college sample, we recruited participants from the larger community in Vancouver, Canada. Second, we replaced the no-prime control condition with a specific neutral prime. Third, and most importantly, we introduced an additional priming condition to examine the strength of the religious prime relative to a prime of secular institutions of morality. Political philosophers since at least Voltaire (1977/1727) and Rousseau (1968/1762) have suggested that any moral benefits provided by religion, could be gleaned just as, if not more easily from non-religious sources. The idea of a justice system, and more generally, a social contract, could be considered the strongest modern examples of such secular sources. Thus, the ‘secular’ Prosocial Behavior 9 condition was added to examine the relative effect of the religious prime with that of the secular prime. Finally, we examined whether participants reported any awareness that the prime activated religious thoughts. Participants Seventy-five participants were recruited via a combination of posters placed around Vancouver and newspaper ads. Only 22% of participants were students, and the sample was quite diverse. Ages (M=44) ranged from 17 to 82. Yearly household incomes (M=$35K) ranged from under $10K to over $80K. Of those who indicated a religion, 25 identified as Christians and 3 as Jews. Of the remaining 47 who did not indicate a religious affiliation, 21 reported being ‘spiritual,’ 22 reported being ‘agnostics’ or ‘atheists’, and 4 declined to answer. Participants were defined as atheists if they indicated “atheist” or “agnostic,” and scored below the midpoint of the scale on a question assessing belief in God – a more stringent criterion than in the first study. Theists were those who indicated a religion and scored above midpoint on the same belief measure. Procedure Participants followed the same procedure as in the first study with a few notable exceptions. Instead of having a confederate act as the second player in the dictator game, participants were led to believe that subjects alternated between being a ‘giver’ or ‘receiver’. Every participant was then led to believe that they randomly happened to be an odd-numbered participant, and thus a giver. Whatever decision they made would affect the following even-numbered participant. Participants in the control condition received a neutral prime, made up of the same scrambled sentences as the other conditions but without any target words to form a specific concept. Participants in the Prosocial Behavior 10 ‘secular’ condition received a prime that contained the target words civic, jury, court, police and contract. Participants in the ‘religious’ condition received the same prime as in Study 1. At the end of the study, participants completed demographic measures including self-reported religiosity and belief in God. Following that, we asked two questions at the very end of the questionnaire: 1) Please briefly speculate on what you think this study was about so far and 2) Has there been anything that you do not understand or find odd about this study so far? In addition, participants were interviewed orally and any suspicions expressed about the unscrambled sentences task were also recorded. Results and Discussion The effect of the primes. The main effect from the first study was replicated. Participants in the religious condition offered an average of $4.56, while those in the control condition offered $2.56, resulting in a $2.00 difference (t(48)=2.47, p<.02, prep=.93, d=.71). Due perhaps to the more heterogeneous sample, there was much greater variance in the amount of money offered than there was in the first study (see Figure 2). Note that as in Study 1, the religious prime shifted the modal response from selfishness to fairness. A higher proportion of participants behaved selfishly (offering nothing) in the control condition (40%) than in the religious condition (12%), whereas a higher proportion behaved fairly (offering exactly $5) in the religious condition (44%) than in the control condition (28%) (χ(N=31)=4.40, p=.036, prep=.90). Unlike the first study, there was a weak religiosity by prime interaction in this sample (F(1, 46) = 2.22, p = .14, prep=.78) indicating that the effect of the religious prime appeared to be stronger among theists than among atheists; the effect for atheists only was in fact non-significant (t(15)=.09, p=.93, prep =.50). This inconsistency is considered Prosocial Behavior 11 more fully in the general discussion. Again, unprimed atheists did not differ from unprimed theists, (t<1). Self-reported belief in God, as a continuous measure, was not a good predictor of how much participants took in the unprimed control condition (r(25)= .12, p=.58, prep=.50). The secular prime, meanwhile, had nearly as large an effect as the religious one. These participants left, on average, $4.44, or $1.88 more than those in the control condition (t(48)=2.29, p<.03, prep=.92, d=.67). Suspicion Probe. The key question was whether participants reported any awareness that words in the unscrambled sentences task reminded them of religious concepts, and/or that this reminder was somehow related to the economic decision making task. Consistent with past research using this and related priming procedures (for reviews, see Fazio & Olson, 2003; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), the vast majority of participants did not report any awareness of this connection. Only 3 participants (2 in control, 1 in secular prime, 0 in religious prime) mentioned anything like religious concepts affecting or being related to generosity, and these participants were dropped from analysis. Of the 75 participants included, 5 participants (2 in religious prime, 2 in control, 1 in secular prime) mentioned religion in general, vague terms. We made the decision to retain these 5 participants. We found that neither excluding these 5 retained participants, nor including the 3 dropped ones, had any effect on the final results. Furthermore, those 8 participants who mentioned religion at all were distributed across all three conditions (in fact the majority were in the control and secular conditions); this suggests that their report was not due to the priming procedure; more likely, a few participants mentioned religion because the suspicion probe followed immediately after demographic questions, which included questions about selfProsocial Behavior 12 reported religiosity. These findings on suspicion are consistent with the literature on implicit priming showing that, priming categories, goals, and emotions using this and other related methods affect behavior, even for the vast majority of participants who report no awareness of the prime (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Taken together, these facts point to the conclusion that our main findings cannot be explained away by the priming procedure and the derivative issue of demand characteristics. This study demonstrates, then, that the prosocial effect of the religious prime is not limited to college students, but is in fact robust across a much more diverse sample. Moreover, since a neutral prime was used in the control condition, and the suspicion probe revealed little reflective awareness of the religious nature of the prime, we can further rule out the possibility that the effect of religious concepts on prosocial behavior was an artifact of the priming procedure itself, or was a byproduct of demand characteristics. Finally, we showed that these types of selfishness restraining effects of religious suggestion were as strong as implicit activation of concepts related to secular moral institutions. General Discussion God concepts, activated implicitly, increased prosocial behavior even in anonymous situations and towards strangers. God concepts had as much effect as concepts that activated a secular social contract in reducing selfishness and the effect size was quite large. How much these God concepts affected atheists was, however, inconclusive. While the effect emerged clearly for atheists in the first study, it all but disappeared in the second. Although further investigation is needed, we speculate that this may have been due to our stricter definition of atheism in the second study. It is conceivable that avowed Prosocial Behavior 13 atheists, unlike other non-religious people, may doubt the existence of supernatural agents even at the implicit level. We leave these questions about atheism open for future investigation. In the meantime, we examine different potential explanations for the effect we did find among the majority of our participants. Possible Explanations Prosocial behavior can be influenced by increased positive or negative mood (Schaller & Cialdini, 1990), or by increased feelings of empathic concern (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987). It is conceivable that the religious primes increased prosocial behavior by acting via these mechanisms. However, in a follow-up study (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2006) in which we measured self-reported positive and negative affect (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) and dispositional empathy (Davis, 1983) immediately after participants were primed, we found no evidence for these mechanisms. Those receiving the religious prime reported neither increased positive or negative mood, nor increased empathic concern. Two possible theoretical explanations for this effect remain to be explored in the future. A behavioral priming or ideomotor action account involves the fact that the activation of perceptual-conceptual representations increases the likelihood of goals, plans and motor behavior consistent with these representations (Bargh et al, 1996). Supernatural concepts such as God and prophet are moral actors semantically and dynamically associated with acts of generosity and charitable giving. Irrespective of reputational concerns, participants may have automatically behaved more generously when these concepts were activated, similar to when participants are more likely to Prosocial Behavior 14 interrupt a conversation when the trait construct “rude” is primed, or when university students walk more slowly when the elderly stereotype is activated (Bargh et al, 1996). Another possible explanation that we explore in some detail is that the religious prime activated the perceived presence of supernatural watchers, which then increased prosocial behavior (for similar observations about supernatural concepts, see Bering, in press; Boyer, 2001). Although religions vary profoundly across cultures, central to all faiths is the idea of one or more omnipresent and omniscient moralizing agents who defy death, ignorance and illusion, demand costly sacrifice, and arbitrate behavior in groups (Atran, 2002; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006). Generosity in cooperative games has been shown to be sensitive to even minor changes that compromise anonymity and activate reputational concerns (Hoffman et al. 1994; Haley & Fessler, 2005). Debates continue as to whether cooperative behaviors towards unrelated individuals, especially those driven by passionate commitment, exist independent of short-term self-interest (e.g., Gintis, Bowles, Boyd, & Fehr, 2003). However, reputation management can go a long way in explaining the evolutionary stability of cooperative behavior between strangers, to the extent that selfish individuals are detected and subsequently excluded from future cooperative ventures. A recent experiment (Haley & Fessler, 2005) found that even so subtle a cue as stylized eyespots on the computer background had an effect in increasing the amount of money that was offered in the dictator game. Similarly, an image of a pair of eyes increased money contributions to an “honesty box” used to collect money for drinks in a university lounge (Bateson, Nettle, & Roberts, 2006). If the mere presence of eyespots could increase generosity, it is very plausible that rousing belief in a supernatural watcher Prosocial Behavior 15 could produce similar effects, as was shown in an experiment by Bering et al (2005) in which the belief that a dead graduate student’s ghost resides in the testing room reduced cheating on a spatial reasoning task. In sum, we are suggesting that activation of God concepts, even outside of reflective awareness, match the input conditions of our ordinary agency detector and as a result trigger this hyperactive tendency to infer the presence of an intentional watcher. This sense of being watched then activates reputational concerns, undermines the anonymity of the situation and, as a result, curbs selfish behavior. There is no necessary reason why only one of these mechanisms need be responsible for the effect. Religious sentiments have been culled and honed through hundreds of generations, and may rely on multiple psychological mechanisms (Dennett, 2006), a possibility we leave open for exploration in future research. Religion and the Origins of Civilization There has been much speculation about the contemporaneous emergence of religious iconography and the rapid increase in population densities (Cauvin, 1999). It is possible, even likely, that these early religions greatly facilitated this population growth. Prior to around 12,000 years ago, group sizes remained small – limited by the threat of nonreciprocating defectors (Axelrod, 1984). Therefore, social group size was restricted to genetically related individuals, bound by kin-selection (Hamilton, 1964) and a handful of recognizable neighbors, bound by reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Theorists of religion, from Durkheim to Rappaport, have commonly attributed religion’s socially cohesive effects on collective participation in costly ritual, rather than belief in supernatural agents (see Sosis & Alcorta, 2003, for a discussion). However, here we have found evidence that the invocation of supernatural agents may have played a central role. Prosocial Behavior 16 If the cultural spread of supernatural moralizing agents expanded the circle of cooperation to unrelated strangers, it may well allowed these small groups to grow into large scale societies, from the early towns of Jericho and Ur to the metropolises of today. One evolutionary explanation for our results invokes group selection, such that ancestral societies with culturally widespread God concepts would have outcompeted those without, given the cooperative advantage of believing groups (Wilson, 2002). However group selectionist accounts of religion, and altruistic behavior in general, although in principle plausible, face a number of well-known theoretical and empirical challenges (e.g., Atran, 2002). One need not have to appeal to group selectionist arguments to explain the higher likelihood of generosity as a function of cognitively accessible God concepts. As we have discussed, another plausible scenario exploits the responsiveness to reputational concerns. These concerns – naturally selected because they ultimately maximized individual fitness in social groups (e.g., Bateson et al, 2006; Haley & Fessler, 2005) – could be activated by the perceived presence of any intentional, moralizing agents. An Experimental Procedure to Measure the Effects of God Concepts Religions are widespread elements of all societies and are deeply affecting in the lives of most people in most societies. Yet, scientific understanding of religion’s impact on psychological processes remains poor. Implicit primes of concepts, goals, and affective states have been fruitfully used in social psychology in a wide range of domains (see Bargh and Chartrand, 1999). A similar causal and unobtrusive measure of God concepts has a number of potentially useful applications. This experimental procedure facilitates the measurement of the causal effect of specific religious concepts on people with a wide Prosocial Behavior 17 variety of explicit beliefs – theists and atheists alike, and everything in between. Since it operates largely outside of explicit awareness, participants are unlikely to respond to demand characteristics or consciously revise their behaviors and beliefs. The priming technique can be readily and interestingly applied to how religion affects prosocial behavior (Batson et al, 1993), moral intuitions (Cohen & Rozin, 1999), teleological reasoning (Kelemen, 2004), and prejudice (Allport & Ross, 1967). An experimental procedure activating religious concepts implicitly can be an important complement to other research designs, contributing to the growing efforts of cognitive and social scientists towards the development of a natural science of religion. Prosocial Behavior 18 Acknowledgements We thank Sarah Allen and Courtney Edgar for their assistance and contributions. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported this research via a grant to the second author (410-2004-0197) and a fellowship to the first (766-20050756). Prosocial Behavior 19 ReferencesAllport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice.Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 5, 432-443.Atran, S. (2002). In Gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford:Oxford University Press.Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition,commitment, compassion, communion. (target article). 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(1988).Development and validation of briefmeasures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality& Social Psychology, 54, 1063-1070.Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prosocial Behavior 23 Figure CaptionFigure 1. Frequency distribution of money offered by condition (Panel A – No Primecondition, Panel B – God concepts prime condition) (Study 1).Figure 2. Frequency distribution of money offered by condition (Panel A – Neutral Primecondition, Panel B – Secular prime condition, Panel C – God concepts prime condition)(Study 2). Prosocial Behavior 24 cash offered10.09.08.07.06.05.04.03.02.01.00.0No Prime Condition10