The Relation between Religious Beliefs and Prosocial Behavior

The main expectation regarding the results would be finding similarities between the motives behind one’s religious belief and one’s prosocial tendencies. For example, an Inner-Type Believer with extrinsic emotional motives would be more willing to perform prosocial acts in vignettes where actor feels like a good person or avoids guilt feelings whereas an Outer-Type Believer with extrinsic social motives would be more prone to behave in a prosocial way in vignettes that actor gains social benefits or receives acceptance from the society. The reason behind having similar motives for being a believer and acting prosocially would be due to the teachings and reinforcements of religious beliefs toward helping their members and being generous to them. As prosocial behavior is exhorted by major monotheistic religions, believers are thought to be more altruistic as compared to non-believers. However, this study would refute this assumption since it was designed to highlight the difference between altruistic motives and instrumental motives in prosocial behavior as well as including dilemmas that would contradict with the benefits resulting from instrumental prosocial acts. Grouping believers with intrinsic motives and extrinsic motives separately would show that, Autonomous Believers could be more inclined to have altruistic motives while acting prosocially and fit into this assumption by behaving in a prosocial way to a greater extent than Non-Believers regardless of the dilemmas as they have intrinsic motives for being a believer, which leads them to be expect no benefits in return for their actions. On the other hand, Inner-Type Believers and Outer-Type Believers would be more tend to act prosocially according to the social and emotional benefits they receive after their actions due to having extrinsic motives behind their religious beliefs, which would lead them to be less willing to engage in altruistic prosocial behaviors and more likely to avoid acting prosocially in scenarios with dilemmas that could put their emotional and social benefits in danger. They would also be more tend to act in a socially desirable way, make ingroup favoritism and be discriminative toward outgroups in order to keep benefiting from their religious group on personal and social level. Thus, their selective approach toward help seekers would hinder them from being truly altruistic unlike the general presumption.

In contrast to the members of monotheistic religions, Non-Believers would be less likely to favor ingroup members while discriminating others as they do not belong to a community based on common values that carry out rituals and gatherings on a regular basis unlike believers. Hence, their prosocial tendencies would have a universal target and they would be more willing to act prosocially in scenarios with dilemmas in comparison to Inner-Type Believers and Outer-Type Believers as they have no obligation to fulfill the expectations of a particular group and thus no benefits to lose. However, not assessing the motives of Non-Believers behind their religious opinion would be a limitation for the study as the vignettes are designed based on the idea that motives behind religious beliefs would be tied to motives behind prosocial behaviors. Future studies should focus on the motives behind not identifying oneself as a believer in order to understand whether non-believers could be considered under different categories like believers and whether the categories based on their motives could predict their likeliness to embrace a more altruistic or instrumental approach while performing prosocial behaviors. Moreover, assessing the motives behind prosociality through a self-report design would be another limitation for the study as Galen (2012) states that observing participants in real action could lead to more valid results as social desirability and stereotypical effects might change the course of action of religious individuals. Therefore, investigating prosocial tendencies of individuals through observational designs would enhance the validity of future findings in the literature.