The Relation between Religious Beliefs and Prosocial Behavior
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All the items in the materials would be united in an online survey form and presented to the participants via www.qualtrics.com. Survey link would be sent to the participants through e-mail and 30 minutes would be assigned to complete the survey. First part of the study would consiste of demographic questions with multiple choices regarding the age, gender, education and religious beliefs of the participants. Participants who indicated that they identify themselves as a member of one of the major monotheistic religions (choosing either “Christian”, “Muslim” or “Jewish” options) would be directed to answer the items of Hoge Religious Motivation Scale, revealing their motives behind describing themselves as believers. Participants who chose either “Atheist” or “Deist” options would not take this part and directly proceed to answer the vignettes. 28 vignettes in total, including 16 scenarios about prosocial behavior that do not create dilemmas and 12 scenarios about prosocial acts with dilemmas, would be randomly presented to the participants. After reading each vignette, participants would be asked to rate how willingly they would engage in the described behavior from 1= not at all to 10= very much. Their ratings would be assessed within seven categories depending on the characteristics of dilemmas and motives behind the described prosocial behaviors. The categories would be labeled as (i) altruistic motives, (ii) inner motives, (iii) outer motives, (iv) material motives, (v) inner dilemmas, (vi) outer dilemmas and (vii) material dilemmas. Based on their answers in the question that ask them to indicate their religious belief and items in Hoge Religious Motivation Scale, participants would be divided into four groups: (i) Non-Believers group consisted of participants who described themselves as “Atheist” or “Deist”, (ii) Autonomous Believers group included participants who have intrinsic religious motivation, (iii) Inner-Type Believers group consisted of participants who have extrinsic religious motivation with a tendency to use religion as a personality support or help in crisis, and (iv) Outer-Type Believers group included participants who also have extrinsic religious motivation with a tendency to use religion for social purposes. The relation between religious beliefs and motives behind prosocial behavior would be investigated through assessing participants’ ratings within seven categories and looking for the correlation between them and the characteristics of groups that participants were assigned to. The overall rating of participants for engaging in prosocial behavior would be also taken into consideration in order to have insight about the general tendency of each group to act prosocially. Results Findings of Cabral, Ozbay and Schotter (2014) highlights the importance of the past behaviors of help seeking actors while determining one’s tendency to perform prosocial acts toward them, where help seekers’ prosocial behaviors in the past would lead individuals to be affected by instrumental reciprocity and return the favor whereas unhelpful behaviors of these actors would prevent individuals to act prosocially for the same reason. Moreover, findings of this study also suggest that individuals would be more willing to act prosocially when they were in a position that allows them to benefit from the help seeking actors in return in the long run due to the influence of instrumental motives. Thus, I would expect that, participants in Inner-Type Believers and Outer-Type Believers groups would indicate higher ratings of willingness for the vignettes that involve help-seeking actors who were described as being nice to them in the past as these participants would be driven by extrinsic motivation which includes avoiding guilt feelings, maintaining social relationships and having a good reputation (Hoge, 1972). In other words, their tendency to be influenced by instrumental motives would lead them to behave in a socially desirable way to a greater extent than Autonomous Believers and Non-Believers in order to return past favors they have received. Additionally, Outer-Type Believers would indicate lower ratings of willingness for prosocial behaviors in vignettes including dilemmas that risk their good reputation, social relationships and acceptance in society because they would be more prone to keep their social connections to receive some benefits from their social circle in return due to their instrumental motives. Their tendency to value social relationships with people who could also help them to a greater extent than the sake of help seeking actors would lead Outer-Type Believers to favor ingroup members and be discriminative toward outgroup members while performing prosocial behaviors because helping outgroup members would damage their relationships with ingroup members due to conflicting values and outgroup members would not be in their close circle in order to return their favor in the future. Aside from Outer-Type Believers, I would also expect Inner-Type Believers and Autonomous Believers to indicate higher ratings of willingness to act prosocially in vignettes assessing outer motives that involve help seeking actors with similar values, while revealing lower rates of willingness in vignettes with outer dilemmas which include help-seeking actors with conflicting values. As Galen (2012) stated in his article that, religious individuals report greater prosociality toward ingroup targets that share a similar background and values, but their willingness to act prosocially becomes essentially zero or even negative when the target is an outgroup member. Therefore, participants who identified themselves as believers would be more inclined to perform ingroup favoritism and show discrimination to outgroup members in comparison to Non-Believers. However, I would expect Autonomous Believers to reveal the highest overall ratings for being willing to perform prosocial behaviors. As they are not fueled by inner or outer benefits due to having intrinsic religious motivation (Hoge, 1972), the characteristics of their motivation behind being a believer would predict a similar kind of motive in prosocial behaviors and would lead them to act altruistically without expecting some benefits in return. Thus, their altruistic motives characterized by enhancing one’s wellbeing without the intention of benefitting from the action reciprocally (Hawley, 2014) would direct Autonomous Believers to have the greatest scores for prosocial behavior regardless of the various dilemmas in the vignettes that would hinder them from gaining advantages after the described actions. On the other hand, I would expect Outer-Type Believers to have the lower overall ratings for being willing to act prosocially. Although Saroglou, Pichon, Trompette, Verschueren and Dernelle (2005) suggested based on their findings that prosociality of religious individuals does not derive from social desirability bias, Hoge (1972) describes Outer-Type Believers as individuals who use religion as a tool to form social relationships, have a good social reputation and be accepted by the other members in society. Thus, this kind of believers in particular would be more prone to act in a socially desirable way while performing prosocial behavior as well for social purposes. As they prioritize social desirability, Outer-Type Believers would not rate high levels of willingness to act prosocially in vignettes with outer dilemmas that would contradict with their social purposes. Also, their extrinsic motivation behind identifying themselves as believers would similarly apply to their prosocial behaviors as performing prosocial acts is primed in monotheistic religions, and hinder Outer-Type Believers to be willing to help others in vignettes with altruistic motives and various dilemmas because these scenarios do not provide any benefit for the actor in return. Vignettes with no benefits and vignettes with dilemmas outnumbers the benefit included vignettes, which would lead Outer-Type Believers to have the lowest scores. Download 34.69 Kb. Share with your friends:
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