Religion and society

 

I am interested in how a person's religiosity and membership to a religious group influences economic behavior, especially in strategic interactions where others' religious identities are observable. Purely out of curiosity and for fun, I initiated this research program as a "pet project" at the start of the millennium. It led me to discovering how different dimensions of religiosity can bear counterworking effects on prosocial behavior and cancel out. In a followup study on religion and trust, I showed how religion increases trust between religious people when such counterworking effects are absent. These two papers have been of interest across disciplines.

 

This has prompted further research extending to multi-cultural interactions across various countries and cultural identifiers. In my recent paper on religion, discrimination and trust across three cultures, we establish the willingness of people to discriminate across a wider variety of cultural and demographic markers. This opens up a discussion of effects from the interplay of markers. I have written my reflections on research in religion and economic behavior in an invited chapter of Paul Oslington's Oxford Handbook.

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These are my papers on religion and society:

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Tan, J. H. W. and D. N. Jayasekara (2024) Perfect Conformity to Observable Minimal Rituals Engenders Trust: An Experimental Test of the Signaling Hypothesis. Forthcoming at Applied Psychology.​

 

Jayasekara, D. N. and J. H. W. Tan (2024). How do Intercultural Proximity and Social Fragmentation Promote International Patent Cooperation? Small Business Economics, 63(1), 421-445.

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Chuah, S. H., S. Gächter, R. Hoffmann, and J. H. W. Tan (2023). Who Discriminates? Evidence From a Trust Game Experiment Across Three Societies. Journal of Economic Psychology, 97, 102630.

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Chuah, S. H., S. Gächter, R. Hoffmann, and J. H. W. Tan (2016). Religion, Discrimination and Trust Across Three Cultures. European Economic Review, 90, 280-301.

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Chuah, S. H., R. Hoffmann, B. Ramasamy, and J. H. W. Tan (2016). Is There a Spirit of Overseas Chinese Capitalism? Small Business Economics, 47, 1095-1118.

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Tan, J. H. W. (2014). Behavioral Economics of Religion, P. Oslington (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Economics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Chuah, S. H., R. Hoffmann, B. Ramasamy, and J. H. W. Tan (2014). Religion, Ethnicity and Cooperation: An Experimental Study. Journal of Economic Psychology, 45, 33-43.

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Hoffmann, R. and Tan, J. H. W. (2012). Religion, Markets and Society: An Introduction, Homo Oeconomicus, 29, 7-12.

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Tan, J. H. W. and C. Vogel (2008). Religion and Trust: An Experimental Study. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29(6), 832-848.

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Tan, J. H. W. (2006). Religion and Social Preferences: An Experimental Study. Economics Letters, 90(1), 60-67.

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Tan, J. H. W. (2003). On Altruism, Christianity, and Economics, Journal of the Association of Christian Economists, UK, 32, 8-16.

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