Thinking about God encourages intergroup prosociality even when conflict is salient

Abstract

Recent research documents that thinking about God encourages intergroup prosociality among believers. An open question is whether such increased prosociality is dampened by intergroup conflict. We conducted preregistered field experiments with two ethno-religious populations in Fiji: indigenous Christian iTaukei (N = 324) and Hindu Indo-Fijians (N = 280). In each study, we manipulated (between-person) whether participants thought about intergroup conflict before completing a dictator game in which we manipulated (within-person) whether participants thought about God’s preferences when allocating real money to an outgroup member. Although participants who reflected on intergroup conflict gave less money away to outgroup members, thinking about God led to significant and comparable increases in intergroup prosociality regardless of whether participants thought about conflict. Results challenge widely-held assumptions about the role of religious belief in intergroup conflict and raise questions about mechanisms that are often theorized to explain the spread of religious beliefs themselves.