Religion's Role in Prosocial Behavior: Myth or Reality?

Abstract

If you based your answer on almost all classic theorists, the answer would be affirmative. For instance, religion, as part of culture, provides mechanisms that control the natural destructiveness of humans caused by their narcissism and sexual impulses (Freud, 1927/1961). God is seen as a projection of the superegotic instance of the imaginary father and as such reminds us of the two important taboos of incest and killing (Freud, 1913/ 1919). Generativity, as the main developmental task of middle adulthood (Erikson, 1963), is particularly emphasized within a religious perspective (McFadden, 1999). Saints and holy figures are models of charity and altruism, i.e. behaviors that are pragmatically risky but important for human community (James, 1902/1985). Religion provides specific reinforcements and punishments, thus solidifying social moral standards (Skinner, 1969). Finally, from a sociobiological and evolutionary perspective, it is assumed that religion allows for a shift from altruism limited to natural kinship towards a cultural altruism extended to a larger cultural “kinship” (Batson, 1983) and for the creation of broad coalitions promoting ties of extended reciprocal altruism (Kirkpatrick, 2005). But if you turn to empirical research, the answer to our question becomes more difficult and quite complex. On the one hand, self-report measures of different aspects of prosociality—volunteering, helping behavior, agreeable personality (Big Five), low psychoticism (Eysenck’s personality model), forgiveness, valuing benevolence, sense of generativity— provide systematic evidence in favor of the above theories: religious people report being prosocial and they do so across the large variety of the abovementioned ways in which prosociality is expressed (Batson et al., 1993, 2005; Dillon et al., 2003; McCullough & Worthington, 1999; Saroglou, 2002, in press; Saroglou et al., 2004). Interestingly, this prosocial tendency as a function of religion seems to be universal. For instance, the high agreeableness of religious people seems constant across countries, religions, and even cohorts (McCullough et al., 2003; Saroglou, 2002, in press), and the importance of the value of benevolence among religious people is typical of Jewish, Christian, Muslim (Saroglou et al., Religion’s Role in Prosocial Behavior: Myth or Reality?