Believers
Religious beliefs, gambling attitudes, and financial market outcomes
Alok Kumar, Jeremy Page & Oliver Spalt
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates whether geographic variation in religion-induced gambling norms affects aggregate market outcomes. We conjecture that gambling propensity would be stronger in regions with higher concentrations of Catholics relative to Protestants. Consistent with our conjecture, we show that in regions with higher Catholic-Protestant ratios, investors exhibit a stronger propensity to hold lottery-type stocks, broad-based employee stock option plans are more popular, the initial-day return following an initial public offering is higher, and the magnitude of the negative lottery-stock premium is larger. Collectively, these results indicate that religion-induced gambling attitudes impact investors' portfolio choices, corporate decisions, and stock returns.
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David Reinstein & David Hugh-Jones
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some social institutions reveal participants' behavior in the aggregate, while concealing the identities of the participants. For example, individual church donations may be kept anonymous, while the total amount raised is publicized. This presents a puzzle in light of recent evidence that anonymity reduces contributions. We offer an explanation for this puzzle in the context of a model of costly signaling with two types of agents: conditionally cooperative ("good") and uncooperative ("bad"). We consider costly participation in a community activity (e.g., tithing) as a signal of an individual's type. By signaling the presence of one more good type, this may lead other good types to contribute more in future, more important, collective goods problems (CGP's). Thus, if good types also value others' contributions more than bad types, good types gain more from sending the signal. But if those who do not signal face exclusion, the signal would need to be made very costly to dissuade bad types from signaling. In contrast, if the institution is anonymous, so that it reveals only the total number of signals, then while signals cannot be used to exclude bad types, even an inexpensive signal may succeed in revealing the total number of good types. This information helps good types maximize the conditional cooperation component of their utility in the CGP, and, under specified conditions, can increase expected CGP contributions. We characterize conditions under which an anonymous signaling institution increases expected welfare. We provide examples of institutions that may yield such benefits, including religion, music and dance, voting, charitable donation, and military traditions.
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The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out?
Ed Diener, Louis Tay & David Myers
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
As we estimate here, 68% of human beings-4.6 billion people-would say that religion is important in their daily lives. Past studies have found that the religious, on average, have higher subjective well-being (SWB). Yet, people are rapidly leaving organized religion in economically developed nations where religious freedom is high. Why would people leave religion if it enhances their happiness? After controlling for circumstances in both the United States and world samples, we found that religiosity is associated with slightly higher SWB, and similarly so across four major world religions. The associations of religiosity and SWB were mediated by social support, feeling respected, and purpose or meaning in life. However, there was an interaction underlying the general trend such that the association of religion and well-being is conditional on societal circumstances. Nations and states with more difficult life conditions (e.g., widespread hunger and low life expectancy) were much more likely to be highly religious. In these nations, religiosity was associated with greater social support, respect, purpose or meaning, and all three types of SWB. In societies with more favorable circumstances, religiosity is less prevalent and religious and nonreligious individuals experience similar levels of SWB. There was also a person-culture fit effect such that religious people had higher SWB in religious nations but not in nonreligious nations. Thus, it appears that the benefits of religion for social relationships and SWB depend on the characteristics of the society.
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Deity and Destiny: Patterns of Fatalistic Thinking in Christian and Hindu Cultures
Maia Young et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, August 2011, Pages 1030-1053
Abstract:
The current studies investigate whether different forms of fatalistic thinking follow from the Christian and Hindu cosmologies. The authors found that fatalistic interpretations of one's own life events center on deity influence for Christians, especially for those high in religiosity; however, Hindu interpretations of one's own life emphasized destiny as much as deity (Study 1). Also, the focus on fate over chance when explaining others' misfortunes depends on the presence of known misdeeds for Christians, but not for Hindus (Study 2). Finally, Christians prefer petitionary prayer over divination as a strategy for managing uncontrollable future risks (Studies 3a and 3c), and preference for these strategies can be primed in bicultural Hindu Americans by a Hindi-accented telephone interviewer (Study 3b).
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Flouting Faith? Religious Hostility and the American Left, 1977-2000
Andrew Pieper
American Politics Research, July 2011, Pages 754-778
Abstract:
Recent scholarship has outlined and debated theories of a culture war taking place within the United States, with religious traditionalists pitted against nonorthodox religious believers and nonbelievers. Some scholars and commentators contend that the American Left has contributed to this culture war through its hostility toward Americans of faith. This theory, which I call the Irreverent Left thesis, purports that such hostility has caused religious traditionalists to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, leading to Republican victories in national politics. This article examines whether the Left has become more hostile to religion. Using content analysis of American Left publications - The Nation, In These Times, and Mother Jones - I examine the attitudes of progressive elites from 1977 to 2000. Findings indicate that although the American Left has become more hostile toward religious faith, this hostility is more likely a result of the shifting partisan loyalties than a cause.
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Surrender to God and stress: A possible link between religiosity and health
Andrea Clements & Anna Ermakova
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, forthcoming
Abstract:
An abundance of evidence supports that stress predicts poor health, and religiosity, broadly defined, typically predicts good health. It is possible that one mechanism by which religiosity positively impacts health is through reduction in or prevention of the stress response, and that Surrender (Surrender to God) is a measure that captures aspects of religiosity that would predict lowered stress levels. In the present investigation, two samples were studied in order to investigate the relationship between one characterization of religiosity (Surrender) and stress. Participants in Study 1 were 460 (306 female) Southern Appalachian undergraduate university students who completed the Surrender Scale (Wong-McDonald & Gorsuch, 2000) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI, Spielberger, 1983) online during spring 2009. Study 2 utilized a high-risk (low income and/or high pregnancy risk) sample of 230 pregnant women involved in a longitudinal study who completed the Surrender Scale and the Prenatal Psychosocial Profile (PPP, Curry, Campbell, & Christian, 1994), which contains an 11-item stress measure, during their first research contact early in pregnancy. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that Surrender was consistently inversely related to stress on both the STAI and the PPP. These findings contribute to the current understanding of the religiosity-health association in two ways. First, they offer support for Surrender and its associated lower stress levels to be explored as a mechanism by which religiosity influences health. Second, findings support the exploration of the potential for stress reduction through increasing Surrender in reportedly religious individuals.
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Religion, fertility and genes: A dual inheritance model
Robert Rowthorn
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 August 2011, Pages 2519-2527
Abstract:
Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain 'religiosity' gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of 'cultural hitch-hiking', whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.
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Angelic Belief as American Folk Religion
Scott Draper & Joseph Baker
Sociological Forum, September 2011, Pages 623-643
Abstract:
Belief in angels and their intervention in the material world is prevalent in the United States. Theoretically, the concept of folk religion offers an instructive lens into the popularity of these beliefs, which exist inside, outside, and across official religious doctrines, and are therefore able to transcend the boundaries of specific religious traditions by appealing to a diverse array of believers. Empirical analyses from a recent national survey support the application of the concept of folk religion, demonstrating that these beliefs are present in substantial proportions across disparate subgroups. Belief in angelic intervention is prevalent among conservative and "mainline" Protestants, Catholics, those with high levels of conventional religious practice, biblical literalists, and even those who strongly believe in "paranormal" phenomena such as Bigfoot and ESP. Belief in angels and claims of angelic protection provide compelling and flexible narratives, ready cognitive attributions, and emotional comfort. Consequently, these views have strong memetic appeal and are transposable into multifarious subcultures.
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Muslim American communities' response to queer visibility
David Rayside
Contemporary Islam, July 2011, Pages 109-134
Abstract:
Muslims in the U.S. are comparatively well-educated, economically indistinct from the rest of the population, with a set of attitudes broadly compatible with the political mainstream. One of the few issue areas on which they stand out as distinctly conservative is on homosexuality, where rates of "disapproval" are at the same level as among evangelical Protestants. This view is reflected in the positions taken by most organized Muslim groups in the U.S., and almost certainly by the vast majority of religious leaders. There are indications of Muslims adapting their faith to the western context, and to intergenerational change in attitudes to sexual diversity. However, increasing sensitivity among American Muslims to the distrust or disdain to which their faith is subject, and to the heightened sense of scrutiny that they experience, may well be contributing to a retention of selective moral traditionalism.
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Family Values, Social Capital and Contradictions of American Modernity
Philip Webb
Theory, Culture & Society, July 2011, Pages 96-123
Abstract:
Contemporary American social and political discourses have integrated concerns about family values into the realm of debates about the associational life of social capital. In these discussions, theoretical and historical confusions about the relations between family and civil society run rampant. In this article, I first bring theoretical clarity to these social structures and the type of relations upon which they are predicated and, second, briefly historicize the relationships between an American idea of family and civil society. By tracing changes in popular understandings of family and civil society, I demonstrate that the modern family values movement spurns its Victorian roots by maintaining the nostalgic language for a life and family of old built around a Christian home, while embracing means and institutions, and even more importantly, a form of family, which belies the nostalgia. The family has now become an institution or association which can be sustained through instrumental interventions; it is no longer to do with the organic relations of sentiment remaining from some long-faded Gemeinschaft. The family and the Christian home ideal, which were at the center of American critiques of modernization, have ceased to be.
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Differences in Delay Discounting of Some Commodities as a Function of Church Attendance
Jeffrey Weatherly & Heather Terrell
Current Psychology, September 2011, Pages 258-267
Abstract:
Recent research has suggested that the positive benefits of religiousness that are reported in the literature may be related to "self-control." The present study attempted to determine whether religiousness, as measured by self reporting of regularly attending church services, would be related to how participants discount delayed outcomes. Three hundred one university students completed a delay-discounting task involving five commodities (1000, 100000, annual retirement income, federal education legislation, and medical treatment). Participants who reported regularly attending church services discounted both monetary amounts significantly more than did participants who reported not regularly attending church services, indicating that church goers placed less value on those commodities than non-church goers. Rates of delay discounting did not differ between groups for the other commodities. These results suggest that religiousness alters how people frame certain decisions involving delayed outcomes, but not others.