From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries a signal across nerve junctions. You might know of it because of its links to Parkinson’s disease, but it’s actually pretty widespread in the brain and does a number of interesting things.

Variants of one particular molecular receptor for dopamine, the D4 receptor, seem to have interesting links with risk taking and novelty seeking. But the links are not at all straightforward, and recent research suggests that what it actually does is tweak your susceptibility to environmental influences.

Joni Sasaki at the University of California, Santa Barbara wanted to know if this could help explain the mixed responses to religious priming that have been reported before. As regular readers of this blog will know, giving people subliminal religious prompts seems to make them more prosocial, but the effect doesn’t seem clear cut.

So what Sasaki and her colleagues did was to run a straightforward religious priming experiment. The subjects (all undergraduates) had to unscramble words to form sentences. Half the subjects were given sentences that had a religious theme, the other had nonreligious sentences. The idea is to get people thinking about religion without realizing what they are doing.

Afterward, they measured their subjects’ willingness to volunteer for a bunch of actual organizations and clubs around the college.

The top line results were similar to other studies. Overall, religious people were no more willing to volunteer than the nonreligious, but people who had been primed with religion were more willing to volunteer—regardless of whether or not they were religious themselves.

But not everybody responded to the priming. As the graphic below shows, the response depended on the variant of the D4 gene. People with one particular variation (2-/7-repeat allele) got a really big prosocial boost from the religious prime. People with the other variant were pretty prosocial without the prime, and their prosociality actually decreased with priming!

All this goes to show that the relationship between genetics and religion is not at all straightforward (something I’ve touched on before.) This particular gene variant seems to make people more susceptible to environmental influences—whether religious or otherwise.

If you looked at these people in a religious environment, then you would say that this is a gene “for” religion. Put these same people in a nonreligious environment, and you would say that is a gene “against” religion!

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

It seems likely that religious people in the West give more to charity—in the narrow sense of financial donations, at least (see “Atheists are generous—they just don’t give to charity” for more details).

But what is it about religion that has this effect? Is it that the fear of being watched makes people behave nicer? Perhaps it’s that religious teachings simply encourage charity. Or maybe it’s being in a religious congregation and having someone demand that you hand over cash.

One way to dig into this is to take a look at other cultures. Taiwan is a good case study because it has a good mix of folk religion, atheism, and world religions (Buddhism and Christianity). Hiewu Su and colleagues from the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan interviewed 410 Taiwanese about their charitable and religious habits, among other things. Christians gave the most, followed by Buddhists, then folk religionists, and finally those with no religion.

These were not large differences, and indeed they also found that giving is a “rational and planned behavior for both religious and nonreligious people.” In other words, regardless of religion, what people give can be predicted on the basis of their income, age, and whether they felt that charities were open about how they spent their money.

There was one other crucial factor that affected charitable giving (the most important, in fact), and that was religious service attendance. They found that religious service attendance was the most important factor determining whether and how much people gave to charity—even for people with no religion.

However, there were big differences here between the religions. Buddhists who went to religious services were 2.4 times as likely to give to charity, and Christians were 2.2 times as likely. However, folk religionists and atheists who went to services were only 1.7 times as likely to give as those who did not attend. When it came to the amount of giving, they found that this was significantly increased for Christians and Buddhists who went to religious services, but not for folk religionists and atheists.

What I take from this is that we can discount simplistic ideas that a watchful “eye in the sky” encourages us to give more. After all, it doesn’t seem to encourage folk religionists to give.

On the other hand, religious gatherings do seem to encourage charitable giving. That might be because people are actually encouraged to give on the spot, or it might be that giving to co-religionists is easier than random giving, or it might be something to do with religious teachings.

And with that last idea in mind, I find it fascinating that the effect of religious gatherings is largest for Christians and Buddhists. These are two very different religions—about the only thing they have in common is that they are both “world religions.” What that means is that they are religions that have been adopted by people from a wide variety of different cultural backgrounds. As a result, they have special features that make them especially attractive to people who live in large, organized mega-societies. The kinds of societies in which dealing with strangers is commonplace.

Previous research has found that world religions are linked to the emergence of ideas of fairness to and sharing with strangers. This research adds to that, suggesting that it’s only in the religious congregations of these world religions that charity gets a boost—it’s not an intrinsic consequence of religion in general terms.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Does religion actually make any difference? By that I mean, does the brand of religion that takes hold in a particular region (Islam, Buddhism, Animism, etc.) actually change the culture in any meaningful way? Of course, we know that there are real, measurable differences between adherents of different religions. But is that caused by the religion, or is it simply that cultures differ and that the local religion molds itself to the local culture?

Adam Cohen at Arizona State University thinks that religion can change culture, and he’s written an excellent, plain English introduction to his research in the open-access journal Readings in Psychology and Culture.

A key point that Cohen makes is that Jews and Christians differ on whether simply thinking something wicked is as bad as actually doing something wicked. So, for example, he found that Christians were more likely than Jews to believe that a man who thinks adulterous thoughts has done something wrong. And not just adultery either—there were similar differences of opinion over a student who fantasizes about poisoning his professor’s dog after getting a bad grade.

In another test, he asked Jews and Christians to:

Imagine a son, Mr. K., who does not like his parents very much, because they have very different personalities from him. That son can either pretend to like his parents, or he can ignore and neglect them. If he doesn’t like his parents inside, does it mean anything for him to behave nicely toward them?

As the figure below shows, Jews and Christians see Mr. K the same if he both inwardly dislikes his parents and also neglects them in reality (the “Sincere condition” in the graph). But Jews, in contrast to Christians, were much more likely to think favorably of Mr. K if he pretends to like his parents.

Cohen attributes these differences to differences in their respective holy books. For example, Jesus explicitly condemns thought crime (“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”). In contrast, Cohen says:

the Jewish attitude is that it is better to override your temptations out of obedience to God. True virtue is doing what God says even if you don’t internally want to.

All of this puts me in mind of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, in which he wrote about thoughtcrime:

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.

Now, Orwell was an atheist, and his book had a pretty big impact on me when I was a kid. All of which set me to thinking: Is thinking bad thoughts a crime for atheists, or are they more like Jews? Even more interesting, are atheist Jews different from atheist Christians in this regard?

There is one study out there, which I wrote about last year, which found that Protestants were more likely than atheists to conflate thinking and doing. (Protestants tempt fate, but atheists don’t!)

I’d love to hear your perspective, though. Should you feel guilty about thinking nasty things about someone and then lying to them? Is that kind of dishonesty bad? If not, why not?

From Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman of Sinai and Synapses:

Quite often, what makes us happy and what is actually good for us are directly at odds with each other. What worked for us evolutionarily over the millenia frequently becomes counterproductive in our current world. For example, fat was a scarce and valuable resource when Homo sapiens evolved on the African savannah, but with vending machines, Starbucks Trentas, and the KFC Double-Down, what made our bodies happy millions of years ago are now things we should be trying to avoid today.

But if those same issues arise with our bodies, what about our brains? What do we do with our evolutionary cognitive history?

David DiSalvo, who writes about science, technology, and culture for Scientific American, Forbes, and Psychology Today, has a new book coming out entitled What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. I had the opportunity to interview DiSalvo, exploring questions about the cognitive aspects of religion and atheism, hope and faith, certainty and doubt, and the creation of meaning.

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