Perceiving Self, Others, and Events Through a Religious Lens: Mahayana Buddhists vs. Christians.

Tsung-Ren Huang,Yi-Hao Wang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00217

Abstract

Are all religions essentially the same? Are believers of different religions heading in the same mental direction? To answer these questions from a sociopsychological perspective, we compared social sensitivity and causal attribution styles between Mahayana Buddhists, who practice unbiased love and compassion toward every being, and Christians, who pursue a union with God. Despite a similar cultural background, sex ratio, age distribution, socioeconomic status, and fluid intelligence level, these two religious groups in Taiwan showed opposite tendencies when inferring the mental states of others – as religiosity increased, the theory of mind ability increased in Mahayana Buddhists but decreased in Christians. Furthermore, these two religious groups showed opposite tendencies of attributional style – as religiosity increased, self-serving bias decreased in Buddhists but increased in Christians. These marked religiosity-dependent, sociopsychological effects suggest that different religions may shape or attract their followers who are moving in quite distinct mental directions.

Highlights

In 2010, 83.6% of the 6.9 billion people around the world were religious, and by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center, the percentage will grow to 86.8% of a projected 9.3 billion people (Hackett et al, 2015)
Compared to Christians, Mahayana Buddhists exhibited less self-serving bias (SSB) in causal attribution and better Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities. These sociopsychological differences between the two religious groups increased as a function of religiosity, suggesting religious differences to be a key contributor to the effects
Despite Christianity being the predominant religion in North America but a minor religion in Taiwan, the discrepancy in results was not primarily due to such a majority–minority or other cultural differences because we replicated our finding with a general U.S population on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In 2010, 83.6% of the 6.9 billion people around the world were religious, and by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center, the percentage will grow to 86.8% of a projected 9.3 billion people (Hackett et al, 2015). A person’s ToM ability is likely modulated by how the person perceives oneself and/or interprets social events (i.e., attribution), both of which are taught quite differently in Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity. It remains to be empirically tested whether the followers of these two religions differ in their ToM abilities. Because Christians tend to be more self- and God-centered than other-centered (Han et al, 2008; Epley et al, 2009; Gebauer et al, 2017), we expect Christians to be more inclined toward self-serving attributions and less accurate in the ToM tasks than are Mahayana Buddhists We expect both the SSB and the ToM ability to be functions of religiosity. The differences in self-other processing between Mahayana Buddhists and Christians, if any, are expected to grow with religiosity

Procedure

Participants

RESULTS

DISCUSSION