11/26/2010 Religious people often punish unfair behavior even when they suffer themselves are drawbacks. This shows a new study by Professor Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich on the role of faith for fair play.
The civilized human coexistence based on respect for social norms such as fairness, cooperation and honesty. What matters is that many people are willing to punish unfair behavior with punishment. This punishment, however, is often associated with disadvantages for the punisher. It can cause a loss of a be profitable transaction out if unfair methods condemned a business partner. Fair play, confronted with an economic advantage, and requires the repression of selfish impulses.
The belief in powerful, moralizing gods helps to suppress such selfish impulses. Those who believe that an omniscient, supernatural power expected of him to meet fair standards of behavior and enforce, it will also do more. Recent findings indicate that religious people tend to maintain the rules of fair play and participate in more prosocial behavior. At the same time is less likely that they cheat to gain an advantage.
Until now, however, has shown no one that promotes a religious background, the enforcement of rules of fairness, even if this creates its own disadvantage. For this reason, examined the research team led by Ernst Fehr, Charles Efferson (both University of Zurich), Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway University of London) and Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford University) the effect of religion on the punishment of unfair behavior, in the own disadvantages to be accepted.
donor punished more
The subjects played a simple economic game in which a player either for a fair result (He gets as much money as the second player) or can provide an unfair but economically advantageous result (the first player will get much more than the second player). The second player could then spend money to reduce the gain of the first player, that is to punish the first player. Before the second player should make the decision on the punishment to address a series of rapidly changing and not consciously perceptible words was shown - a religious vocabulary, secular punishment or control vocabulary words. In some of the subjects who were exposed to all the religious words, the altruistic punishment of unfair decisions adopted strongly - and in subjects who had recently donated to a religious organization.
This result suggests a mechanism that standards of fairness in large anonymous groups, strengthens and adds the question of how religions developed pro-social, an important finding. Religious people punished because they think that the supernatural power of this expected of them and they do not disappoint them. If the belief in a supernatural power strengthens the cooperative behavior within a group, then religion is an ever-increasing number of trailers to survive and thrive. In this way, wear these religions also for their own survival.
source information service idw
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