{"id":61646,"date":"2025-01-21T17:26:10","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T17:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/?p=61646"},"modified":"2025-01-21T17:26:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T17:26:10","slug":"who-is-generous-and-to-whom-generosity-among-christians-muslims-and-atheists-in-the-usa-sweden-egypt-and-lebanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2025\/01\/21\/who-is-generous-and-to-whom-generosity-among-christians-muslims-and-atheists-in-the-usa-sweden-egypt-and-lebanon\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is generous and to whom? Generosity among Christians, Muslims, and atheists in the USA, Sweden, Egypt, and Lebanon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today\u2019s societies are increasingly multi-religious. Christians, atheists, Muslims, and people of other religions live side by side, interacting both with people from their religious ingroup and outgroups. As we also have limited resources, we choose how to distribute those resources between ourselves, ingroup members, and\/or outgroup members. So how do we share our money in such multi-religious situations? We know from previous literature in social psychology that people often favour their ingroup. Regardless of whether people like the same sports team or come from the same place, we tend to give and help those from the same group more than those from another group. The same goes for religious groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, many religions highlight the importance of acting prosocial and being generous, and an interesting question is whether this emphasis is shown in real life. Are religious people more prosocial than non-religious people? Or are religious people more prosocial mainly to those from the same religious group as themselves? These questions of general or parochial generosity have been investigated in the past, but a clear answer is still lacking. The lack of clarity depends mainly on how previous investigations have looked at it: they have not directly compared generosity when people know the recipient\u2019s religious affiliation and when they do not know \u2013 and they have not directly compared situations when one can be generous both to oneself, an ingroup member, and\/or an outgroup member.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Method and analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To address these questions, we used an adapted Dictator Game, where participants allocated a sum of money between themselves, a Christian, a Muslim, and an atheist in one of six rounds. In the other five rounds, participants divided money between themselves and others grouped by non-religious categories, such as movie preferences or ideological beliefs. This design allowed us to directly compare how religiosity influenced generosity when the recipient\u2019s religious affiliation was known (allocations in the religion round) versus unknown (allocations in the non-religion rounds). We could also assess how generous Christians, Muslims, and atheists were toward religious ingroup and outgroup members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Results<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A total of 1700 participants across three samples \u2013 Sweden, USA, as well as Egypt and Lebanon \u2013 with different religious affiliations played the adapted Dictator game. When comparing generosity between religious and non-religious participants, the first two studies found that there was no difference between the two groups in how much money was given away in the non-religion rounds (i.e., when knowing about favourite movie genre, top vacation place, etc.). However, in the religion round, religious people gave more than atheists. In the last study, there were not enough atheists to compare the groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further, both Christians, Muslims, and atheists gave much more to their ingroup member than to their outgroup members in the religion round. This ingroup effect in the religion round was stronger than the ingroup effect shown in most other rounds across all three studies. Last, Muslim participants gave the most to their ingroup, relative to outgroups, in the USA and possibly in Sweden. In the third study (Egypt and Lebanon), there was no difference between Muslims and Christians. This was due to Christians behaving similarly to Muslims, i.e., they also demonstrated an extra strong ingroup effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is religion such a strong ingroup? It is difficult to say which aspects of being religious creates this increased effect. After conducting our first two studies, we thought that the reason for Muslims\u2019 stronger ingroup generosity might be that they are a minority group in both Sweden and the USA. That was the main reason that we wanted to investigate how participants behaved in Muslim-majority countries. However, we did not find support for this explanation \u2013 the ingroup favouritism by Muslims was about as strong in Egypt and Lebanon as in the previous two studies. Moreover, we saw that Christians in Egypt and Lebanon exhibited similar levels of ingroup favouritism as the Muslim participants, which was not the case in the previous two studies. Thus, religious systems themselves may play a role in fostering ingroup favouritism, with varying success depending on cultural context and denomination. However, even atheists displayed a strong ingroup favouritism in Sweden and the USA \u2013 stronger than most other ingroups included in the studies.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do the result mean for multireligious societies? One lesson is that when religious affiliation becomes salient, the ingroup effect can become stronger. This means that highlighting religious affiliation might not be advisable when the aim is to get people to be prosocial across religious borders. On the other hand, when interacting with religious ingroup members, it also means that signalling a shared religious affiliation could generate more generosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is ingroup favouritism irrational, or does it represent a conscious tendency to prioritise certain relationships? Some researchers consider it a bias \u2013 a cognitive limitation that distorts fairness. Ingroup generosity might be viewed as an unfair advantage that benefits some while excluding others, or as a form of partial kindness that, while not universally applied, still represents an increase in overall prosocial behaviour. These perspectives suggest that ingroup favouritism can be seen both as a limitation and as an opportunity for generosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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[1]<\/a> The exceptions are some of the ideology round ingroups: socialists in Sweden, liberals in the USA and conservatives in Egypt and Lebanon. These, as well as the other religious groups, displayed ingroup generosity as high as or higher than atheists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s societies are increasingly multi-religious. Christians, atheists, Muslims, and people of other religions live side by side, interacting both with people from their religious ingroup and outgroups. As we also have limited resources, we choose how to distribute those resources between ourselves, ingroup members, and\/or outgroup members. So how do we share our money in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":61647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"coauthors":[11447,11448],"class_list":["post-61646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psych"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61648,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61646\/revisions\/61648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61646"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=61646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}