THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYand Andrew Mahoney at the Victoria University of Wellington in 2008.
The researchers invited Christians in New Zealand to play a financial
game with anonymous Christians in Canada (unbeknown to them, a
computer actually controlled the Canadian responses). The performance
of these New Zealand Christians was compared against the performance
of New Zealand citizens in Wellington, who thought they were playing
with anonymous New Zealand citizens in Auckland (again, these players
were fictional and a computer controlled their actions). Bulbulia and
Mahoney’s key finding was that the New Zealand Christians were far
more generous toward their anonymous fellow Christians in Canada
than were the Wellington citizens towards their Auckland counterparts.
This finding and several others like it suggest religious identity can bond
people across the world far more powerfully than secular connections do.
Consistent with this account of religion as a social glue are findings
showing how belief in an omnipotent deity or deities can foster a sense
of always being watched, the hope that one might be rewarded for good
behaviour and a fear of punishment for disloyalty. It’s easy to see how
such an arrangement could benefit discipline and help unite large
groups in a common cause.
Advocating the “religion as a side-effect” explanation are psycholo-
gists, such as Pascal Boyer at Washington University in St Louis, who
have noticed that many of the elements of religion appear to have piggy-
The religious process. Russian Orthodox monks lead a crowd of pilgrims at
Solovetsky Monastery.