In everyday life, humans must constantly make decisions whom to trust and with whom to cooperate. But how can people recognize reliable cooperative partners?
In our new paper published in Evolutionary Psychology, we hypothesized that participants will choose as cooperative partners people who display markers of religious commitment. Since religions have been known to regulate cooperation by imposing norms and moral obligations on their members, signaling commitment to such norms by adoring religious badges may effectively help to find reliable cooperative partners.
In our experimental manipulation in Mauritius, we photoshopped religious badges (Hindu and Christian) on some pre-selected faces and let participants to choose faces for cooperative exchange in an economic game. We found that while faces adoring religious badges were trusted more on average, this effect held only for faces that displayed commitment to religions congruent with participants' affiliation. This is in contrast with previous studies on US undergraduate samples that find religious badges increase trust even across religious divides. Find more in the full article: https://journals.sagepub.com/…/full/10.1177/1474704918817644.
Jana Nenadalová, Piotr Szymanek (Jagiellonian University), and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State University) received a grant from the Open Science of Religion initiative (supported by the John Templeton Foundation) for a virtual reality study.
In his thesis, titled Costly signaling theory of pilgrimage: The case study of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he studied whether pilgrimages may function as costly signals of commitment to group norms.
