The Effects of Buddhist Religiosity and Aspects on Prosociality

ABSTRACT

Religion prosociality hypothesis, which predicts that religion promotes prosocial behaviors, has been verified by previous empirical research. However, the religion in the previous studies investigating Eastern religions has often been examined as a single and unified concept. In the current study, based on a few studies in the context of Western religions, we considered the religiosity as a complex construct and investigated the influence of Buddhist religiosity and primed Buddhist and Christian aspects on prosociality through two studies. In Study 1, participants’ prosocial tendencies were measured by the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM). In Study 2, we employed a subliminal priming task to investigate the effects of aspects of Buddhist and Christian traditions on prosociality measured by self-reports with explicit requests for donating money amount in nonbelievers. The results of Study 1 revealed that Buddhist believers exhibited more prosocial tendencies than nonbelievers, and female participants exhibited more prosocial tendencies than male participants. Study 2’s results showed that the Buddhist and Christian priming groups exhibited more prosocial intentions than the neutral priming group. Furthermore, for the group primed with the Buddhist words, the aspect of the spiritual activated more prosocial intentions than did the aspect of the agents and institutional. Taken together, these findings suggest that Buddhism, especially the spiritual component of Buddhism, increased prosocial tendencies.

Acknowledgmen

The authors thank all participants in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used for this article are available in the Open Science Framework repository (https://osf.io/etfcz/).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2024.2353440.

Notes

¹ Although Shariff et al. (2016)‘s meta-analysis showed that religious priming had a robust effect on prosociality among believers, whereas it did not strongly affect nonbelievers, the researchers suggested that it was still an open question with regard to the factors modulating the relationship, as there was variability in the effect sizes across studies.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [BK20200863]; MOE Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [20YJA190007]; MOE Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [22YJCZH019].