Atheists Are Generous-They Just Don't Give to Charity

Tom Rees
If a pollster asked how much you give to charity, what would you say? Some pretty exhaustive analyses from Arthur Brooks (a professor of business and government policy at Syracuse University) suggest that if you're nonreligious, the figure you'll report to the pollster will likely be smaller, on average, than the numbers claimed by the religious. Score one for religion: clearly it makes for nicer, more generous people. That, at least, is the message that Brooks would like to leave you with (for more on Brooks, see Tom Flynn, Are Secularists Less Generous? FI, August/ September 2010). But hang on a moment. There's more to generosity than handing over cash to a charity, and there are plenty of other ways to help your fellow humans. How do the nonreligious perform when it comes to generosity in kind, rather than in cash? There have been a few studies looking into this, and they reveal a rather different picture. Take, for example, a 2007 study of doctors by Farr Curlin at the University of Chicago. Private general practice can be pretty lucrative, but some doctors choose instead to work among the pooreffectively taking a pay cut in order to help the most needy. Curlin found that 35 percent of nonreligious doctors, compared with 28 percent of Catholic and 26 percent of Protestant physicians, choose this callingno sign here of mean-spiritedness among the nonreligious. Frank Gillum at Howard University and Kevin Masters at Syracuse University found something similar when they looked at blood donations by members of the general public. Neither the religion in which the person was raised (versus none), religious service attendance, nor the importance of religion in daily life were related to whether the person had given blood in the past. So, when you widen the scope to include charitable behavior other than simple cash gifts, the idea that religious people are more generous than the nonreligious takes a hit. However, we do need to be cautious about self-reported behavioranswers can be notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes to values that are important to an individual's view of oneself. Are people telling you the truth or simply what they want you to believe? Psychologists are acutely aware of this problem and have developed a whole battery of tests designed to measure altruism objectively. One of their favorites is the ominous-sounding dictator game. In it, the subjects are given a small sum of money (say, $10) and are told that they can leave some, all, or none for another participant (who has not been given any money). The participants in the transaction are entirely anonymous. You could keep the lot and no one would ever know; consequently, any money you do give demonstrates blind, unselfish generosity. Perhaps surprisingly, most people put in this situation (at least, those people who have been raised in urbanized cultures, in which anonymous transactions are more common) do in fact leave something. Yet, when religious and nonreligious people are compared, it turns out that they give equal amounts in the dictator game. Once again, there's no sign of religious altruism at play. These results are not flukes. When assessed in objective, unprompted conditions, the religious are consistently found to be no more generous, kind, or caring than the nonreligious. Take for example the classic 1973 study by psychologist Daniel Batson. He set up a situation in which students had to pass along an alleyway where a man lay slumped, seemingly unconscious. A few stopped to help. But the highly religious were no more likely to do so than the less religious. In another of Batson's studies, participants were asked to volunteer to help raise money for a sick child. Some were told they would probably be called upon; others were told they would probably not be. This time the religious were more likely to volunteerbut only when they were told that their help would probably not be required! Batson concluded that religion seems to promote the need to be seen as generous but not generosity itself. Vassilis Saroglou, a psychologist at the Universit

Catholique de Louvain, put the implications in plain terms: The contrast between the ideals and selfperceptions of religious people and the results of studies using other research strategies is so striking that researchers may be tempted to suspect moral hypocrisy in religious people. That isn't the full story, however. There is another consistent finding from research into altruism, which is that when you put people in a religious environment or feed them subtle religious cues, their honesty and kindness does turn up a notch. (Bizarrely enough, religious cues are equally effective for the religious and nonreligious, but that's another story.) This was illustrated in a real-life setting by Deepak Malhotra at Harvard Business School, who teamed up with an online charity auction house. For the period of the study, Malhotra and the auction house sent an e-mail to the participants reminding them that every cent they bid contributed to the worthy cause. The result? Both religious and nonreligious bid exactly the sameexcept on Sunday, when the bids from the religious went up while those from the nonreligious went down! A bizarre result but one that provides a vital clue to understanding why charitable givingbut not working with the poor or giving blood seems to be particularly favored by the religious. Demands for charitable donations are a regular feature of church attendance, and it may be that the church environment, rather than any inherent generosity, drives the response to such appeals. Using charitable giving to compare the generosity of the religious and nonreligious is problematic for other reasons. Consider the fact that a large part of religious charity goes, to a large extent, straight into the pockets of co-religionists. According to Daniel Chen, an economist at Duke University, some 90 percent of the money that Mormons give to charity goes to other Mormons, while 80 percent of evangelical Christian charity goes to other evangelical Christians. At the other end of the scale are Catholics (at 50 percent), but even Jews, who are the least discriminating in their charity, reserve 40 percent of it for their fellow Jews. Chen found that this roughly mirrors the differing expectations of support that people expect from their co-religionists if they are ill. Giving money in these cases is less charity and more a kind of social insurance. By way of contrast, blood donations involve making a sacrifice for an anonymous strangeran act that seems not to be stimulated by religion. There is one last, and more controversial, special feature about charityone recognized by Brooks himself. Arguably, charity is a means to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Seen in this light, it is a competitor to state welfare programs, because money taken in taxes can't be given as charity. But charity is a relatively ineffective tool for redistributing wealth, because it's susceptible to free riders. These are people who benefit from society's efforts to help the poor but don't give money themselves (after all, if you're not Bill Gates, then your donation will hardly be missed). The free-rider effect occurs because the utility of charitable giving (i.e., the benefit that accrues to the donor from giving, compared with the benefit that would accrue from keeping the money) is low. For the religious, this is not so important. For them, the utility of charitable giving is increased because they believe that they will be rewarded (either now or in the hereafter) by their god. For atheists, however, the free-rider effect dramatically changes the optimal balance between charity and statemediated support for the poor. There's good evidence that this is the case. Chen found that support for welfare was inversely related to religious in-group giving. On an international scale, welfare programs are strongest in nations where atheists are more common. Since state welfare dwarfs charitable giving, even in countries with small welfare states such as the United States, the result is that the least religious countries also have the highest flow of wealth from the rich to the poor and the smallest wealth inequality. This effect also maps onto overseas aid donations. According to data gathered in 2005 by Foreign Policy magazine, private individuals in the United States are the most generous in the world, every day giving six cents to foreigners in need compared with a meager one cent given daily by each Dane. Factor in government donations, however, and it's a different story. The U.S. government gave fifteen cents on behalf of each citizen, but the Danish government gave ninety cents per capita. Put private and public giving together, and Denmarkone of the least religious countries in the world

is clearly the far more generous nation. Do the nonreligious give less to charity than the religious? Well, the data are a bit muddy, but on the balance of probabilities they should, I think, be found guilty as charged. But does this mean that the religious are more generous than atheists? Here the data are clear. The resounding answer is no! http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=generous_atheists

December 2010 / January 2011 Volume 31 Number 1