Religious identity, between-group effects and prosocial behavior: Evidence from a field experiment in China

Taking an experimental approach, this paper studies the between-group effects of religious identity on social behavior. In this experiment, we recruit Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and nonbeliever participants in China and sort them into groups based on their religious identities. We use an online field experiment to measure the participants’ social behaviors, such as fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation behaviors, to investigate how they act when they face people with religious identities that are the same as and different from their own. In addition, we employ a questionnaire scale to test the participants’ religiosity and to analyze the intrinsic mechanism underlying the relationship between religious identity and social behavior. The results indicate that Chinese Buddhists and Christians do not show obvious ingroup favoritism in the behavioral games; however, Muslims display ingroup favoritism and outgroup discrimination in many of the games. Furthermore, we find that the higher a religious believer's degree of religiosity is, the higher the degree to which they will show favoritism toward an ingroup member in the return behavior of the trust game.