Original Article
Religious people discount the future less

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.006Get rights and content

Abstract

The propensity for religious belief and behavior is a universal feature of human societies, but religious practice often imposes substantial costs upon its practitioners. This suggests that during human cultural evolution, the costs associated with religiosity might have been traded off for psychological or social benefits that redounded to fitness on average. One possible benefit of religious belief and behavior, which virtually every world religion extols, is delay of gratification—that is, the ability to forego small rewards available immediately in the interest of obtaining larger rewards that are available only after a time delay. In this study, we found that religious commitment was associated with a tendency to forgo immediate rewards in order to gain larger, future rewards. We also found that this relationship was partially mediated by future time orientation, which is a subjective sense that the future is very close in time and is approaching rapidly. Although the effect sizes of these associations were relatively small in magnitude, they were obtained even when controlling for sex and the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).

Introduction

Evolutionary scientists have begun to inquire into how humans' propensity for religious belief and behavior, which can impose heavy somatic and energetic costs upon their practitioners, might have evolved (e.g., Atran and Henrich, 2010, Bering and Johnson, 2005, Irons, 2001, Norenzayan and Shariff, 2008, Sanderson and Roberts, 2008, Sosis, 2003, Wilson, 2002, Wright, 2009). Religions, in the form with which we are most familiar today, first appeared approximately 10,000 years ago, around the time when human socities were transitioning from hunter–gatherer bands to large-scale agrarian societies (Wright, 2009). We, along with other theorists (Norenzayan and Shariff, 2008, Wright, 2009, Johnson, 2005), believe that this timing was perhaps not coincidental and that religious beliefs and practices developed as they did through cultural evolution in response to challenges that life in large-scale, sedentary, agrarian societies created—specifically, challenges related to cooperative action with large numbers of nonkin and challenges related to agricultural food production, which traded larger outlays of initial effort for larger caloric yields (McCullough & Carter, 2011).

Several proposals focus on the notion that religious beliefs and behaviors promote generosity or cooperation among unrelated individuals, perhaps in turn yielding (a) the economic gains associated with reciprocal cooperation or the production of public goods or (b) enhanced group cohesion that promotes effective intergroup competition (Bering and Johnson, 2005, Henrich et al., 2010, Johnson, 2005, Norenzayan and Shariff, 2008, Sosis, 2000). Supporting these proposals, experimental manipulations of religious cognition have been reported to increase generosity (Pichon et al., 2007, Shariff and Norenzayan, 2007), honesty (Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007), and submission to authority (Saroglou, Corneille, & Cappellen, 2009). If religious beliefs and behaviors, despite the costs they can impose, enabled humans to take advantage of life in large, agrarian societies made up primarily of nonkin, then such beliefs and behaviors might have propagated through cultural–evolutionary mechanisms (Henrich et al., 2010, Richerson and Boyd, 2005, Sanderson and Roberts, 2008, Wright, 2009).

But there are cognitive constraints on the evolution and proximal production of prosocial behaviors such as cooperation, including the ability to forego immediately available rewards in the interest of larger rewards that can be obtained only after a delay (Curry et al., 2008, Stephens et al., 2002, Stevens et al., 2005, Yi et al., 2007). For example, Curry et al., 2008, Yi et al., 2007 demonstrated that participants' discount rates (i.e., the rate at which the value of a reward is downgraded as a function of the time until its receipt) were negatively associated with cooperation during economic games such as the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Therefore, overcoming impulses to defect in social dilemmas to gain the longer-term benefits of mutual cooperation could be one pathway by which religious cognition promotes prosocial behavior (McCullough & Carter, 2011). On this basis, we hypothesized that religiousness is associated with a stronger preference for large rewards that can be obtained only after a delay versus small rewards that are immediately available (Kirby and Maraković, 1996, Rachlin, 2000). Reyes-García et al. (2007) made a similar argument for how delay of gratification helps people obtain the forms of human capital (e.g., formal schooling) required to transition from activities that characterize self-sufficient societies (e.g., hunting, foraging) to those that characterize market-based societies (e.g., wage-earning).

To understand how religious belief and behavior might influence delay discounting at the cognitive or computational level, it is useful to consider the cognitive processes that lead to intertemporal choice dilemmas. Researchers have discovered that people's choices between small rewards available after a short delay versus larger rewards available after a longer delay may reflect the operation of one or two distinct neural systems, although the computational tasks that these systems perform is debated. Despite disagreement, there is reasonably good consensus that intertemporal choice requires distinct computations of reward value and time to reinforcement, and that individual differences in preferences for larger–later versus smaller–sooner rewards can be traced to differences in the operation of circuits that compute reward value and wait time (Ballard & Knutson, 2009).

Therefore, if religious belief and behavior influence the operation of systems for intertemporal choice, they might do so in at least two ways. First, chronic involvement in religion, with its attendant social reinforcement of restraint and punishment of impulsivity (Kenrick, McCreath, Govern, King, & Bordin, 1990), might lead to reductions in the strength of the neural signals that represent the value of immediately available rewards or to increases in the signals that represent the value of temporally distant rewards. Second, and perhaps more plausibly, religion might influence the cognitive system or systems that compute wait time. Through development over the life course, adjusting to religious socialization (i.e., via contact with religious parents, peers, and institutions) involves learning to manage incentives to delay gratification. Learning to manage these incentives during development and adulthood might lead to changes in the cognitive system that computes and represents reward delay.

In fact, many religions teach concepts that direct people's attention to the distant future. Preoccupation with future-oriented concepts such as immortality, reincarnation, resurrection, the slow but inexorable creep of divine justice, karma, or places one might inhabit after death such as Elysium, Gehenna, Hades, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Valhalla, or Sheol might cause the intermediate future (e.g., 6 months from now) to feel closer. People's subjective experiences of time are intimately related to their rates of hyperbolic discounting, and—importantly—making time salient increases the correspondence between objective time and cognitive representations of time (Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettman, 2009). Also, people who are intrinsically religious and who indicate an interest in the afterlife tend to report that the future feels as though it is approaching quickly and that they spend a lot of time thinking about the future (Oner-Ozkan, 2007). In other words, the chronic salience of the future that religion encourages might cause religious people to experience distant rewards as subjectively closer, thereby reducing delay discounting.

In the present work, we tested two hypotheses. First, we hypothesized that religiousness is associated with lower discounting of future awards—that is, a stronger preference for larger–later rewards over smaller–sooner rewards. Second, we hypothesized that the association of religiousness with lower rates of discounting is partially mediated by the association of religiousness with future time orientation.

We examined these ideas in a cross-sectional study evaluating whether religious university students had lower rates of hyperbolic discounting and whether that association was mediated by future time orientation (Gjesme, 1979)—a construct reflecting a preoccupation with the future and a sense that it is approaching quickly. In conducting this study, we also statistically controlled for sex differences and for differences in the “Big Five” personality traits (John & Srivastava, 1999), several of which have been associated with both religion (Saroglou, 2010, Stark, 2002) and delay discounting (Miller et al., 2008, Silverman, 2003).

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 277 undergraduates (41% men) at the University of Miami. Their mean age was 19.08 years (S.D.=2.19, youngest=17, oldest=39). Participants reported a variety of religious denominations (44.8% Christian, 10.5% Judaism, 2.5% Islam, 1.8% Buddhism, 1.8% Hinduism, 1.1% Taoism, and 3.6% other). A total of 17.3% of the sample did not report a religious affiliation, and 16.6% selected “none” for their religious denomination. Participants also reported diverse ethnicities (69.3%

Descriptive statistics

Means, standard deviations, and internal consistency reliabilities are reported in Table 1. Intercorrelations among all major study variables appear in Table 2.

Statistical modeling

Data were analyzed with structural equation modeling (SEM) in MPlus version 4.21 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2004). We used SEM because of the advantages it holds over other statistical techniques, namely, (a) it enables the removal of measurement error from latent variables, thereby leading to better approximation of effect sizes; (b) it

Discussion

Many researchers have proposed that religious beliefs and behaviors facilitate prosocial behavior (e.g., Bering and Johnson, 2005, Irons, 2001, Johnson, 2005, Norenzayan and Shariff, 2008, Sosis, 2003; D. S. Wilson, 2002, Wright, 2009) and might have been naturally (or culturally) selected for this function. However, the evolution and proximal production of cooperation rely on a more fundamental cognitive process: The ability to resist impulses to take a smaller–sooner reward so that one can

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    This research was generously supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute.

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