Sep 8, 2009
Religious Attendance Makes Us More Generous
According to a new Gallup survey, people who attend religious services are more likely to donate money, volunteer time, and help a stranger than are those who don’t attend services. The researchers found that even those who don’t belong to any religious tradition are more generous when they’ve gone to worship services.
As a write-up of the research points out:
The effects of religious attendance on generous behavior are much stronger than whether religion is important to an individual. Of those who reported that religion was important part of their daily life, 30 percent said they donated money in the last month, as compared with 29 percent of those for whom religion was not important. Similar findings exist for helping strangers and volunteering time. In all three cases the differences associated with religion being important to the respondent are smaller than those between religious attenders and non-attenders.
The Gallup people don’t give a reason for the results, but some past research has shown that religious rituals and services have the power to create a sense of community in a way that religious devotion alone does not.
I agree that religious services help build a community, but I think there’s a major cause and effect problem with these particular data. Is it simply that more socially-oriented people more likely to be generous and also go to church? The study you cite (fixed url: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121633778/abstract ) was specifically about coalitional commitment – i.e killing people who aren’t members of the group!
I would like to see what the effect of service attendance is in predominantly non-religious countries. In these countries, there’s less social desirability bias linked to religious membership.
Also there is potential response bias – religious people are expected to be more generous, and they respond appropriately on questionnaires (we all tend to give answers on questionnaires that fit our ). The order in which you ask the questions can make a big difference (if you ask people first if they are religious, that changes subsequent answers).
Laboratory studies show that there is only an effect of generosity when the action is public. In other words, religiosity increases public acts of generosity, but not private – which is quite a surprising result.