| Abstract: |
Does religious involvement make people more trusting, prosocial, and
cooperative? In view of conflicting theories and mixed prior evidence, we
subject this question to a stringent test using large-scale, representative
panel data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2009, N ≈ 26,000) and
the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2019, N ≈ 77,000). We employ
cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to account for
time-invariant confounders and reverse causality as two issues that have
haunted earlier research. We find that religious involvement, measured by
frequency of religious service attendance, on average has a positive impact on
generalized trust, volunteering, and cooperation. Compared with religious
attendance, other indicators of religious involvement, such as subjective
importance of religion or whether one is religiously affiliated, have weaker
effects on trust, volunteering, and cooperation. We also document substantial
variation across religious traditions: the effects of religious attendance are
strongest for Anglicans and other Protestants, but weaker and mostly
statistically insignificant for Catholics, Hindus, and the nonreligious, while
for Muslims we observe a negative effect of religious attendance on
cooperation. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of potential confounders
and a range of alternative model set-ups. Our study thus shows that religious
involvement can indeed foster prosocial behaviours and attitudes, although
this effect is in the current study context mostly restricted to religious
service attendance and majority religions. |