For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the link between economic struggles and spiritual resilience.
Do economic hard times drive people to turn to religion for strength and solace? It’s a common notion, whether advocated from the pulpit or satirized by folk singers crooning about “pie in the sky when you die.” But until now, relatively little social scientific research has been conducted on how exactly religious views and economics are interrelated on an individual level. Do people’s economic realities make it more likely that they will hold certain religious beliefs? Does the answer to this question vary depending on people’s perceptions of how stable their economic situations are? Are some kinds of beliefs particularly well-suited to providing resilience during economic hardship? University of Virginia psychologist Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi and Will Gervais are exploring such questions as part of a multi-year project to investigate correlations between people’s religious beliefs and how they think about their past, present, and future economic situations, and to test the causal relation between economic outcomes and different aspects of religious belief.
The task in one of the experiments designed by Brown-Iannuzzi’s team seems simple enough: participants play several rounds of a simple investment game (created by grad students Nava Caluori and Stephanie McKee). After completing each round, participants learn they have either earned a few tokens or lost a few tokens based on their investments. “Essentially, they invest in fictional stocks and get feedback about how their investments went,” Brown-Iannuzzi says. What the players don’t know is that there’s an invisible finger on the scale, with some players assigned better odds of success than others. After the game’s completion, participants are asked a series of questions gauging their affinity for what the researchers term “Western-style karmic belief”: the view that a person’s present success or failure is attributable to their past actions. Importantly, these past actions aren’t limited to the context of the investments in the game but seem to generalize to past actions in their life.