Religious affiliations of Chinese people and prosocial behavior: evidence from field experiments

In this study, the four Chinese religious groups of Chinese Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and nonbelievers were the participants, and an online field experiment was used to measure their prosocial behaviors in dictator game, ultimate game, trust game, and public goods game. In addition, through the degree of devoutness questionnaire, we analyzed the mechanism underlying the relationship between religions and individual prosocial behaviors. The experimental results show that the prosocial behaviors of Buddhists are higher than that of nonbelievers. Buddhists show significantly higher altruistic behaviors and trusting behaviors compared with the nonbelievers; however, their appeals to fairness are lower than that of other groups. The association of the religious affiliations of Christianity and Islam with altruistic behaviors and trusting behaviors are often related to the degree of devoutness, whereas for Buddhists, higher degrees of extrinsically oriented devoutness were associated with higher rejection amounts in ultimatum game.