Religion og økonomi: nytt fra laboratoriet

Atferdsøkonomi er fascinerende greier. Benjamin, Choi og Fisher har gjort eksperimenter for å undersøke hvordan religion påvirker atferd. Funnene er oppsummert i et nytt NBER-paper (åpen versjon her). De går blant annet løs på Max Webers tese om den protestantiske arbeidsetikken, og Robert Putnams tese om at katolisisme gir lavere tillit i et samfunn.

Her er sammendraget:

Although many scholars (e.g., Weber, 1930) have hypothesized that religious identity norms affect economic outcomes, empirical tests have been hampered by the difficulty of identifying exogenous variation in religion. We create exogenous variation by randomly varying religious identity salience in laboratory subjects. The marginal effect of religious identity is the change in subjects’ choices when religion is salient. We test six hypotheses from prior literature. We find that Protestantism increases contributions to public goods. Catholicism decreases contributions to public goods, decreases expectations of others’ contributions to public goods, and decreases risk aversion. Judaism increases worker reciprocity in a bilateral labor market gift-exchange game. We find no evidence of religious identity effects on disutility of work effort, discount rates, or generosity in a dictator game. 

Metoden er slik: først blir forsøkspersonene gitt noen enkle oppgaver. Man får fem ord - hvorav ett er overflødig - som skal omrokkeres til en ny setning. Én gruppe forsøkspersoner får religiøst ladede setninger. Disse setningene fungerer som priming, dvs de setter forsøkspersonens underbevissthet på sporet av religion. Ideen er altså at  f.eks katolske forsøkspersoner som er blitt primed vil være mer bevisst sin egen religion enn katolske forsøkspersoner som ikke er primed.

Deretter får forsøkspersonene en serie oppgaver og strategiske spill, og forskerne undersøker atferden.

Om forholdet mellom religion og tillit skriver de:

We find, consistent with the conclusions of Putnam (1993) and La Porta et al. (1997), that Protestantism increases the supply of public goods while Catholicism suppresses it. Protestants for whom religious identity is salient contribute 15 cents more to the public good than control Protestants, whereas primed Catholics decrease their contributions by 18 cents. Jewish subjects’ contributions are unaffected by the prime. (...)

Putnam (1993), La Porta et al. (1997), and Ruffle and Sosis (2007) argue that the channel through which religion affects public goods provision is trust. Among Catholics, our data support this hypothesis. (...) relative to control Catholics, primed Catholics expect the average member of their group to contribute 12 cents less. Primed atheists and agnostics expect others to contribute 9 cents more, a marginally significant result. However, there is no significant effect of priming on Protestant expectations. This suggests that Protestantism’s positive effect on public good contributions (...) is due to a Protestant norm to unconditionally contribute to public goods, rather than a Protestant norm to trust others.

Altså: protestanter er ikke nødvendigvis mer tillitsfulle, men har en sterkere tilbøyelighet til å bidra til felles goder.