Abstract
Though beliefs in Heaven and Hell are related, they are associated with different personality characteristics and social phenomena. Here we present three studies measuring Heaven and Hell beliefs' associations with and impact on subjective well-being. We find that a belief in Heaven is consistently associated with greater happiness and life satisfaction while a belief in Hell is associated with lower happiness and life satisfaction at the national (Study 1) and individual (Study 2) level. An experimental priming study (Study 3) suggests that these differences are mainly driven by the negative emotional impact of Hell beliefs. Possible cultural evolutionary explanations for the persistence of such a distressing religious concept are discussed.
Highlights
Though the psychology of religion has tended to treat religion as a single construct, evolutionary theories of religion have argued that religion is instead a multifaceted family category – comprised of different beliefs, teachings and rituals that have emerged for different reasons at different times, to serve different cultural purposes
While our focus was on the impact of heaven and hell beliefs on life satisfaction across countries, we note that random effects analyses did reveal that this relationship varied little for heaven beliefs (t11 = .01) and a small to moderate amount for hell beliefs (t22 = .15)
Two large-scale correlational studies conducted with international data sets showed that, controlling for each other, Hell beliefs were associated with lower well-being at the national level and individual level, whereas Heaven beliefs were associated with higher well-being
Summary
Though the psychology of religion has tended to treat religion as a single construct, evolutionary theories of religion have argued that religion is instead a multifaceted family category – comprised of different beliefs, teachings and rituals that have emerged for different reasons at different times, to serve different cultural purposes. Supporting this argument, new evidence demonstrates that these different aspects of religions have systematically distinct psychological effects. Controlling for the belief in heaven as well as obvious third variables such as wealth and wealth inequality, a higher rate of belief in hell is associated with lower national crime rates [2]. These studies suggest that belief in supernatural punishment may curb unethical behavior, allowing for greater social stability and economic success
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