Comparing the effect of religiosity on public goods production and natural resource conservation: a experimental study

In this research, the effect of religiosity on participation in the production of public goods and preservation of natural resources has been investigated. Extraction of participation data and conservation of natural resource has been done through the implementation of online laboratory of public goods and natural resource games. To extract the three dimensions of religiosity (belief, rituals and morality), the 40-item short version of Khodayari Fard's Religiosity Questionnaire was used, and to extract the six dimensions of personality, the 24-item HEXACO short questionnaire was used. The subjects are 102 students from different universities of the country. Ordinary least square regression was used to examine the relationships between variables. The results of the research show that the emotional dimension (morality) of religiosity had a positive effect on participation, while the behavioral dimension (rituals) of religiosity was effective in preserving natural resources. Being a woman and having a doctoral degree have a negative effect on participation. Honesty, from the personality dimensions, has had a positive effect on the preservation of natural resources, and studying economics has increased the extraction of natural resources. The effect of religiosity on natural resource conservation is almost twice its effect on participation. This result shows the fact that religiosity has a greater impact on economic cooperation in situations where there is a possibility of violating the rights of others.