In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. The existing literature documents that charitable giving is very responsive to tax subsidies, but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies. This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious particip...

We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational conce...

The present study examined the association between belief in life after death and six measures of psychiatric symptomology in a national sample of 1403 adult Americans. A statistically significant inverse relationship was found between belief in life after death and symptom severity on all six symptom clusters that were examined (i.e., anxiety, depression, obsession-compulsion, paranoia, phobia...

a r t i c l e i n f o In view of the substantial number of recent studies on relationships between religious involvement and constructive or destructive behavior among adolescents, it is time to consolidate knowledge about these relationships through a meta-analysis. The meta-analysis conducted in this study involves 40 studies published from 1995 to 2009, covering adolescents with an average a...

An explosion of recent research suggests that religious beliefs and behaviors are universal, arise from deep-seated cognitive mechanisms, and were favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. However, if a propensity towards religious beliefs is a fundamental characteristic of human brains (as both by-product theorists and adaptationists agree), and/or an important ingredient o...

OBJECTIVE We report here the impact of an educational training program on attitudes and practices of physicians (MDs) and mid-level practitioners (MLPs) toward controversial spiritual practices, such as practitioner-led prayer, sharing personal religious beliefs, and encouraging patients' religious beliefs. METHODS In this single-group experimental study, 427 physicians and 93 MLPs affiliated...

Diverse cultural components of behavior may have significant impacts on patterns of eating, drinking, and social interaction, irrespective of socioeconomic status. For example, the major world religions prescribe or proscribe specific dietary behaviors; some of these are rooted in historical or geographical origins as well as group folklore; and they have integral roles as expressions of religi...

Religion is often conceived as a conservative social force that sustains traditional cultural beliefs and behaviors. Religion, however, also exhibits predictable socioecological variation and facilitates adaptive response patterns in the diverse environments that humans inhabit. Here we examine how the religious system, which is comprised of a number of interacting components, generates adaptiv...

Recent technical advances in the life and medical sciences have revolutionized our understanding of the brain, while the emerging disciplines of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience continue to reveal the connections of the higher cognitive functions and emotional states associated with religious experience to underlying brain states. At the same time, a host of developing theories in ...

Religion is often conceived as a conservative social force that sustains traditional cultural beliefs and behaviors. Religion, however, also exhibits predictable socioecological variation and facilitates adaptive response patterns in the diverse environments that humans inhabit. Here we examine how the religious system, which is composed of a number of interacting components, generates adaptive...