Universal Love or One True Religion: Experimental Evidence of the Ambivalent Effect of Religious Ideas on Altruism and Discrimination

The forthcoming article “Universal Love or One True Religion? Experimental Evidence of the Ambivalent Effect of Religious Ideas on Altruism and Discrimination” (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12479) is summarized by the author(s) below.

Contrary to the expectations of secularization theory, religion remains socially important and affects politics in multiple ways. More than 80 percent of the world’s population identifies with a religious group and the number of Christian and Muslim believers is expected to increase even further in the coming decades (Pew Research Center 2017). But how does religion affect behavior?

While religion has different relevant dimensions, we investigate the ambivalent impact of religious ideas on altruism and discrimination. Theoretically, religious ideas can increase altruism if they emphasize principles like universal love. However, the belief in the superiority of one’s own faith can also increase discrimination between different religious groups. Therefore, we argue that the specific content of religious ideas matters for behavior.

We test the impact of two opposing, prominent religious ideas on altruism and discrimination versus a nonreligious control prime: universal love and the notion of only one true religion. Using experimental methods, we conducted dictator games with more than 1,200 Christian and Muslim believers in Ghana and Tanzania. In the dictator game, one person is assigned the role of the “dictator” and endowed with a monetary budget. The dictator decides how to allocate the budget between himself/herself and the second player. Participants played the role of dictator twice. For one of the two decisions, the receiver belonged to the same religious group as the dictator; for the other, they belonged to a different one.

We find that people do not behave more altruistically if we prime either of the two religious ideas as compared to a neutral, non-religious idea. However, religious ideas do matter when it comes to intergroup discrimination. The idea of universal love leads to more equal treatment of both the religious in-group and out-group: it increases the proportion of participants who transfer the same amount of money to both. In contrast, under the one true religion prime, the religious out-group receives 11.82 percent lower transfers compared to the in-group.

Thus, to promote peaceful coexistence between religious groups and to avoid conflict, it seems promising to incentivize religious teachings that are particularly tolerant and that de-emphasize the superiority of one’s own religion, stressing instead tolerance toward other faiths and “universal love.”

About the Author(s): Lisa Hoffmann is a Research Fellow and Doctoral Student, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies & University of Hamburg, Matthias Basedau is Director of the GIGA Institute of African Affairs, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Simone Gobien is a Research Associate, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, and Sebastian Prediger,  is an economist with KfW Development Bank. Their research “Universal Love or One True Religion? Experimental Evidence of the Ambivalent Effect of Religious Ideas on Altruism and Discrimination” (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12479) is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.