Costly Signaling Increases Trust, Even Across Religious Affiliations.

Does Religion Promote Trust? The Role of Signaling, Reputation, and Punishment

Scholars of religion, including such luminaries as Durkheim, Rappaport, Turner, and Weber, have widely assumed that religion promotes intragroup trust among adherents. Recent applications of signaling theory to religious behavior among economists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary anthropologists further endorse this assumption. However, trust has not been rigorously or consistently define...

Costly Requirements and Signaling in Religious Groups: The American Congregational Giving Study Short Title: Costly Requirements and Signaling in Religious Groups

Why aren't we all hutterites? : Costly signaling theory and religious behavior.

In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons's theory of religion as a "hard-to-fake" sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual's commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facili...

1 Theocracy over Time

Political authorities have historically had a mysterious tendency towards theocracy, exemplified by their religious titles, close affiliations with religious figures, or even divine powers. To examine theocracy over time, we constructed two unique datasets, one that includes information on the political and religious characteristics of over five hundred polities observed in history and another ...

Does It Pay To Pray? Evaluating the Economic Return to Religious Ritual

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kib...