Be(a)ware of their gods: Effects of cross-religious contextual primes on prosocial behavior among Mauritian Catholics
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | In the last few decades CSR has started to accentuate the role of environment and context in the human cognition and behavior. People do not just think and react differently in different situations; they behave differently in various environments. And various environments work as implicit contextual cues and unknowingly guide our behavior. There is evidence that religious settings can increase in-group prosocial behavior in comparison to non-religious settings regardless of individual religiosity. In religious sites, in general, subjects are tend to contribute more to others and/or common good. In a real world, however, there are not only religious or non-religious environments, but various religious environments we interact with. Moreover, we are affiliated to some of them and not to the others. Do believers behave equally in different religious environment regardless of their religious affiliation? More specifically, does in-group religious contextual prime have stronger positive effect on prosocial behavior among believers than out-group or secular one? The paper will discuss this topic by referring to surprising results of the field experimental study conducted among Mauritian Catholics using different in-group and out-group religious settings, economic games and within-subject experimental design. The paper also discusses strengths and weaknesses of a field experiment in religious studies and anthropology. |
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