Experimental study of prosocial behavior in cross-religious settings on Mauritius
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Experimental methods have started to be gradually adopted and used mostly by anthropologists of religion in the last decades along with the traditional ones. In the paper I will not just discuss strengths and limits of experimental methods in the field theoretically, but by an example of the experimental research project conducted on Mauritius I will show benefits and challenges of field experimenting in detail. In the field experimental project an economic game paradigm was used to explore behavior of religious people in various religious and non-religious environments. While there is an evidence supporting that in-group religious settings increases parochial prosocial behavior in comparison to non-religious one, the prosocial behavior in other´s people religious settings has been mostly unexplored. By discussing project´s methods and its surprising results the paper aims to show how experimental methods and anthropology/religious studies can be enriched by each other. |
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