Ingroup bias is the human tendency to favor one’s own group over others in seemingly all types of interactions. Religious individuals are often associated with moral values closely related to...Show moreIngroup bias is the human tendency to favor one’s own group over others in seemingly all types of interactions. Religious individuals are often associated with moral values closely related to prosociality, such as charity and selflessness. In this paper, I focused on the influence of religion on prosociality in economic decision-making. The goal was to test if religiosity is related to increased overall giving. Further, I predicted that religiosity is inversely associated with ingroup bias due to the religious participants’ increased prosociality. To test this assumption, I used an economic game in which participants had to divide money between an in- and outgroup recipient. While there was a significant effect of ingroup bias in the sample overall, religiosity did not relate to ingroup bias. Religious participants did not give more money to recipients regardless of their in- or outgroup status than non-religious ones overall, nor did they show reduced ingroup bias. Perhaps the sample size or the study’s setup was not appropriate to detect significant results for the effect of religiosity. Alternatively, religiosity is genuinely not associated with reduced ingroup bias nor increased overall giving because religious people might not be more prosocial than non-religious ones. Finally, it could also be that religiosity only matters in the context of ingroup bias when the in- and outgroups are related to religious identities (e.g., Christian ingroup and Muslim outgroup).Show less
Deficiencies in empathic functioning are known to lay at the core of psychopathy and have been suggested to explain their immoral behavior. Although empathy can be divided into affective and...Show moreDeficiencies in empathic functioning are known to lay at the core of psychopathy and have been suggested to explain their immoral behavior. Although empathy can be divided into affective and cognitive components which have been shown to play an integral role in information processing when viewing others’ morally laden actions, the individual contribution of each component on the interpersonal behavior remains to be determined. This study set out to investigate whether incarcerated psychopathic offenders evaluate social situations different to non-psychopathic controls. An adapted version of the Dictator Game using an empathy induction protocol was employed to measure prosocial sharing behavior indicative of how an agent’s behavior is evaluated. Psychopaths showed less differentiation in sharing behavior which might be explained by an impairment of the affective component of empathy. Therefore, the tendencies of psychopaths to adjust to these scenarios should be taken into account when creating treatment plans against recidivism in psychopathic offenders.Show less
