[Vision2020] Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers

[Art Deco]

 Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are
non-believers<http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/04/30/religionandgenerosity/>

By Yasmin Anwar<yanwar at berkeley.edu?subject=RE:%20Highly%20religious%20people%20are%20less%20motivated%20by%20compassion%20than%20are%20non-believers>,
Media Relations | April 30, 2012

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from
the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious
are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists,
agnostics and less religious people.

Study finds highly religious people are less motivated by compassion to
show generosity than are non-believers

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently
drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious
people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they
were, according to the
findings<http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/25/1948550612444137.full.pdf+html>which
are published in the most recent online issue of the journal
*Social Psychological and Personality Science.*

**The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and
charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion,
researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity
was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or
less religious.

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their
emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will
help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer,
a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may
ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as
doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the
suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal
risk or cost.

While the study examined the link between religion, compassion and
generosity, it did not directly examine the reasons for why highly
religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others. However,
researchers hypothesize that deeply religious people may be more strongly
guided by a sense of moral obligation than their more non-religious
counterparts.

“We hypothesized that religion would change how compassion impacts generous
behavior,” said study lead author Laura Saslow, who conducted the research
as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.

Saslow, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco, said she was
inspired to examine this question after an altruistic, nonreligious friend
lamented that he had only donated to earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti
after watching an emotionally stirring video of a woman being saved from
the rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.

“I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly
influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated
in three large, systematic studies,” Saslow said.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed data from a 2004 national
survey of more than 1,300 American adults. Those who agreed with such
statements as “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of
protective towards them” were also more inclined to show generosity in
random acts of kindness, such as loaning out belongings and offering a seat
on a crowded bus or train, researchers found.

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be
charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person,
non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: “These
findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality
among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship
is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the study found.

In the second experiment, 101 American adults watched one of two brief
videos, a neutral video or a heartrending one, which showed portraits of
children afflicted by poverty. Next, they were each given 10 “lab dollars”
and directed to give any amount of that money to a stranger. The least
religious participants appeared to be motivated by the emotionally charged
video to give more of their money to a stranger.

“The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity,”
Willer said. “But it did not significantly change the generosity of more
religious participants.”

In the final experiment, more than 200 college students were asked to
report how compassionate they felt at that moment. They then played
“economic trust games” in which they were given money to share – or not –
with a stranger. In one round, they were told that another person playing
the game had given a portion of their money to them, and that they were
free to reward them by giving back some of the money, which had since
doubled in amount.

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary
compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than
other participants in the study.

“Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend
to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may
actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious
people,” Willer said.

In addition to Saslow and Willer, other co-authors of the study are UC
Berkeley psychologists Dacher Keltner, Matthew Feinberg and Paul Piff;
Katharine Clark at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Sarina Saturn
at Oregon State University.

The study was funded by grants from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science
Center, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, and
the Metanexus Institute.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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