Intuitive and Deliberative Processes underlying Parochial Cooperation: Evidence from US Christians

Religion is often associated with cooperation, morality, and normative behavior across the world. Religious people are seen as more trustworthy (Bailey & Doriot, 1985), likeable (Bailey & Young, 1986), and moral (Hout & Fisher, 2002) than nonreligious people. Conversely, atheists encounter mistrust and discrimination, especially from religious individuals (Gervais, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2011) but also from other atheists (Gervais et al., 2017). However, the heightened cooperative tendencies of religious people may be selective, targeted only at other co-religionists who share the same moral and normative framework facilitating cooperation. Labeled as religious parochialism, constricted cooperation may be conditional on interacting with trustworthy others (Fischbacher et al., 2001), but the extent of such parochialism is currently debated. In this study, we examine religious parochialism in an online sample and test whether different facets of religiosity facilitate the purported parochiality, and whether this effect is intuitive or deliberative.