How religiosity affects human behavior and mood
Why faith makes people spend money, how a magnet can change the degree of a person's religiosity, and also what is common between religion and nature.
The fear of God's punishment is the engine of progress
Belief in moralistic, punitive gods interested in human affairs may have facilitated the spread and development of human societies, according to the study's authors, published in the latest issue of the journal Nature. In this study, scientists test the hypothesis that
belief in an all-seeing and punishing god promotes cooperation, trust and justice among people from regions geographically distant from other adherents of the same religion, thus contributing to the social expansion of the group.
Benjamin Grant Perziki and colleagues interviewed 591 people from eight regions of the world - Brazil, Mauritius, the Russian Republic of Tuva, Tanzania, and islands in the South Pacific. The interviewees were adherents of world religions such as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as supporters of a variety of local religions and traditions, including ancestral faiths and animism. The authors studied the behavior of the participants during the "economic game".
Each participant was given 30 coins, a cube, the edges of which were painted in three colors, and two bowls. Participants were required to guess a color, choose a bowl where they want to place a die, and then toss a die. If the fallen color coincided with the hidden one, then the person had to put some of the coins in a pre-selected bowl, if it did not match, then in another. In one series of experiments, one bowl belonged to the player himself, and the second to a co-religionist living in the same region as the subject. In the second series of experiments, the first bowl belonged either to a fellow believer living in the neighborhood, or to a fellow believer from another region of the globe. In addition, subjects were interviewed in detail and asked questions related to their relationship to their gods, measured and averaged ratings of the qualities of gods, such as, for example, morality, morality, mercy,cruelty.
Promotional video:
The participants in the game did not voice their decisions about the hidden color and the bowl, which means that the decision about where to put the coins remained entirely on their conscience. Nevertheless, if all the players acted honestly, then the final alignment would fit into the picture of statistical probability. However, this did not happen.
Scientists have found: the more a person was inclined to characterize his god as "all-seeing" and "punishing", the more money he was willing to donate to strangers of the same religion.
The results also showed that people do this not because they want divine rewards, but because they believe in supernatural punishment.
According to the experimenters, this study clearly shows that people's belief in supernatural punishment contributed to increased cooperation in societies and their further productive development.
Magnets against religion
However, as other research shows, religiosity is associated not only with a sense of cooperation and cooperation and, moreover, is not a "constant value." Recently, a study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience on the connection between religiosity and everyday nationalism and the brain's response to threats. The researchers argue that by magnetically stimulating the area of the brain responsible for finding and making decisions, it is possible to change a person's attitude towards migrants and religion.
In this study, people filled out tests that determine the degree of their religiosity and attitude towards newcomers. Then the brain of the subjects was influenced by short magnetic impulses. After that, the participants again had to express their opinion about religion and migrants, and before that people were asked to think about death (according to psychologists, such thoughts increase the degree of religiosity) and to look through the texts written by migrants expressing their negative or positive attitude towards their new place of residence.
Despite external stimuli, the results showed a decrease in religiosity by 32.8% and an improvement in attitudes towards immigrants by 28.5%.
According to the researchers, this reaction is explained by the fact that both religiosity and negative attitudes towards migrants are the brain's response to a challenge - a threat. In a situation with religion, the threat is the fear of death; in a situation with migrants, it is the fear of representatives of another culture.
Beautiful scenery distracts from the church
It is possible to reduce the degree of a person's religiosity not only with the help of magnetic impulses, there are also more pleasant ways for this. Thus, psychologists have found that the living environment directly affects the degree of a person's religiosity: the better the climate and the more beautiful the environment, the less often people turn to God and attend church. An article about this unusual study was recently published in the journal Sociology of Religion.
It turned out that people living in regions with beautiful nature and good climatic conditions are much less likely to identify themselves as belonging to one or another confession.
Psychologists naturally explain this by the fact that nice-looking landscapes and good weather contribute to the emotional stability of people and have a beneficial effect on the psyche, that is, they do what a huge number of people are looking for in religion and belief in higher powers.
God against stress
However, it cannot be argued that nature is a monopolist in the market for means to maintain a good mood, and faith does not have a positive effect on the emotional state of a person. Thoughts about God can make believers less frustrated and less stressful, as can daily gazing at beautiful landscapes, according to new research by the American Psychological Association, published in the journal Psychological Science.
Experimental studies have shown that when people think about religion and God, their brains work differently, and this makes it easier for a person to respond to failure. First, the study participants were asked to write down their reflections on the topic of religion, and then - to perform a very difficult test: the level of tasks was so high that all the subjects made mistakes without exception. The results showed that believers who thought about religion and God before completing the assignment had decreased brain activity in the areas of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is responsible, among other things, for behavior and preparedness for unforeseen situations and mistakes.
As a result, they were not very worried and nervous about the mistakes they made.
Atheists reacted differently: if they were previously given tasks related to God and religion, then in the field of ACC activity increased. Researchers suggest that for believers, any life changes can be natural and explainable by faith and religion, so their stressful emotions from failure are much less. On the contrary, for atheists, thoughts about God can contradict their perception of the world and life ideas, which leads to more nervousness and anxiety when they make mistakes.
The researchers believe that these results may help to understand other interesting but controversial information about religious people. For example, there is some evidence that believers live longer, are happier and healthier. Scientists, however, urge atheists not to despair, believing that such patterns can be associated precisely with a system that helps to understand the structure of life and your own world. Perhaps atheists would be just as effective in dealing with stressful situations if they first thought about their own beliefs and beliefs.