Friday Night Theology

The Science of Trust

9 October 2008

This morning, the Telegraph and the Today programme reported that sales of personal household safes had risen by 25 percent. Significant numbers of people, it would seem, are so worried about the security of their savings that they would prefer to stash them under the bed than in the high street. Similarly, our major banking institutions are also showing a reluctance to trust one another in the way they once did. Lending between them has ground to a shuddering halt. We face, then, a crisis of trust.

It seems timely, in a context such as this, that Science, one of the most prestigious academic journals, has recently published a review article addressing, in part, the issue of trust in communities. It explores the concept by means of the phenomenon of religious prosociality, that, "Those who frequently pray and attend religious services…report more prosocial behaviour, such as charitable donations and volunteerism." In fact, the Evangelical Alliance is itself currently involved in looking at this among 14 to 18 year-olds. So far - and these results are preliminary - we have found that church-going young people are almost four times as likely to volunteer as their atheist friends who never attend church. (The full report is due out later this year.)

The question, then, that the Science article raises is why people of faith demonstrate such prosocial behaviour, and in what contexts it is especially expressed. It is here that their analysis is interesting for they find that the association between prosocial behaviour and religion is primarily evident either when religious people are in relatively closed communities, such as a Christian conference, or when people are reminded of their religious beliefs. In fact some studies seem to suggest that in an anonymous setting when no-one is watching, the religious are no more prosocial than the secular - something the man aided by the good Samaritan knew all too well. Hence, they conclude, "Many studies have corroborated that religiosity predicts prosocial behavior primarily when the prosocial act could promote a positive image for the participant, either in his or her own eyes or in the eyes of observers."

On the one hand, this conclusion is deeply challenging for us. It suggests we do more good, but only so as to be seen to look good. On the other hand, though - and this is what their phrase "in his or her own eyes" means - it shows that when people are reminded of God at the point of making an ethical decision they are far less likely to lie or cheat in that context. Hence, wearing a WWJD wrist band probably does make a difference to how we behave.

The relevance of all this to the issue of trust is that it seems to explain why religious communities frequently do far better than secular ones. The Science article cites one study which compared 200 religious and secular communes in 19 th Century America. It found that, "For every year of their life course, religious communes were about four times as likely to survive [as] their secular counterparts." Not only, though, do religious groups survive longer, another study found that they are also larger. The suggested explanation for why religious groups both survive longer and grow larger is the presence of trust and prosocial behaviour within them. To put it bluntly, when they gather together, people of faith trust each other to act in a morally responsible manner, and they do this to such an extent that they do not feel the need to constantly be checking on one another. The report states, "Religious belief…may enhance within-group interpersonal trust, lower monitoring costs, and so further reinforce intragroup prosocial tendencies. Belief in morally concerned gods may stabilize prosocial norms even in the absence of social monitoring mechanisms."

Richard Dawkins once wrote, "It would be interesting to know whether there was any statistical tendency, however slight, for religious believers to loot and destroy less than unbelievers….Such research evidence as there is certainly doesn't support the common view that religiosity is positively correlated with morality." It appears this paper proves him wrong, and so one conclusion we might draw from it is this: if we are to survive our current crisis of trust, what we need is not less religion but more. That, at least, is what the Science suggests.

Justin Thacker, Head of Theology