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Would You Pay for Something if You Didn’t Have To? | Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta
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People who regularly attend service at church pay 22.1 cents less for the Sunday tabloid… This is a large effect, and we can only speculate with regard to its reasons. One reason might be that the church attendees lacked the coin money to make a proper payment. Active religious participation is high in the region, and on a typical Sunday morning it is plausible that many people might have donated some of their coin money to the church. Of course, this explanation does not change the fact that church attendees are particularly dishonest when paying for the newspaper. Another possible explanation is that the church attendees share relevant social traits. Gneezy (2005) found that honesty interacts with social preferences towards the person who benefits from one’s honesty. According to this explanation, a typical church attendee might believe that it would do little harm to the wealth of the publisher if he does not pay for the paper.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
like the twitter poster. cool.
i.e. the paying for something link.
I have noticed a tendency for the church to inculcate giving as something that needs to happen at the church and an unintentional side effect of that is that people start to only give at the church. I have even seen some churches frown on outside giving if it is cutting into the tithing or support of the church.
Taking a sample of one – myself, I have had a tendency in the past to buy into the giving only occurs at church mentality and become rather stingy outside of the church without really realizing why until I thought more about it.
So there are two potential problems that are created that might explain better the newspaper experiment: The church tends to encourage localizing giving to it’s activity and building, and there is built in social stigma inside the church that punishes generosity outside the church rather than celebrating it.