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      Buddhist concepts as implicitly reducing prejudice and increasing prosociality.

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          Abstract

          Does Buddhism really promote tolerance? Based on cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence, we hypothesized that Buddhist concepts, possibly differing from Christian concepts, activate not only prosociality but also tolerance. Subliminally priming Buddhist concepts, compared with neutral or Christian concepts, decreased explicit prejudice against ethnic, ideological, and moral outgroups among Western Buddhists who valued universalism (Experiment 1, N = 116). It also increased spontaneous prosociality, and decreased, among low authoritarians or high universalists, implicit religious and ethnic prejudice among Westerners of Christian background (Experiment 2, N = 128) and Taiwanese of Buddhist/Taoist background (Experiment 3, N = 122). Increased compassion and tolerance of contradiction occasionally mediated some of the effects. The general idea that religion promotes (ingroup) prosociality and outgroup prejudice, based on research in monotheistic contexts, lacks cross-cultural sensitivity; Buddhist concepts activate extended prosociality and tolerance of outgroups, at least among those with socio-cognitive and moral openness.

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          Most cited references37

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          Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction.

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            God is watching you: priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game.

            We present two studies aimed at resolving experimentally whether religion increases prosocial behavior in the anonymous dictator game. Subjects allocated more money to anonymous strangers when God concepts were implicitly activated than when neutral or no concepts were activated. This effect was at least as large as that obtained when concepts associated with secular moral institutions were primed. A trait measure of self-reported religiosity did not seem to be associated with prosocial behavior. We discuss different possible mechanisms that may underlie this effect, focusing on the hypotheses that the religious prime had an ideomotor effect on generosity or that it activated a felt presence of supernatural watchers. We then discuss implications for theories positing religion as a facilitator of the emergence of early large-scale societies of cooperators.
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              Compassionate love for close others and humanity

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Pers Soc Psychol Bull
                Personality & social psychology bulletin
                1552-7433
                0146-1672
                Apr 2015
                : 41
                : 4
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, Brussels, Belgium mclobert@stanford.edu.
                [2 ] Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
                [3 ] National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
                Article
                0146167215571094
                10.1177/0146167215571094
                25676193
                cf9fff04-8957-4274-94b1-74cced884de5
                © 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
                History

                prejudice,prosociality,religious priming Buddhism
                prejudice, prosociality, religious priming Buddhism

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