Belief in karma is associated with perceived (but not actual) trustworthiness

H.H. Ong, A.M. Evans, et al.

Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. ‍17,

No. ‍2, March 2022, pp. 362-377

Abstract

Believers of karma believe in ethical causation where good and bad outcomes can be traced to past moral and immoral acts. Karmic belief may have important interpersonal consequences. We investigated whether American Christians expect more trustworthiness from (and are more likely to trust) interaction partners who believe in karma. We conducted an incentivized study of the trust game where interaction partners had different beliefs in karma and God. Participants expected more trustworthiness from (and were more likely to trust) karma believers. Expectations did not match actual behavior: karmic belief was not associated with actual trustworthiness. These findings suggest that people may use others' karmic belief as a cue to predict their trustworthiness but would err when doing so.

From the Discussion Section

We asked whether people perceive individuals who believe in karma, compared with those who do not, to be more trustworthy. In an incentivized study of American Christians, we found evidence that this was indeed the case. People expected interaction partners who believed in karma to behave in a more trustworthy manner and trusted these individuals more. Additionally, this tendency did not differ across the perceiver’s belief in karma.

While perceivers expected individuals who believed in karma to be more trustworthy, the individuals’ actual trustworthy behavior did not differ across their belief in karma. This discrepancy indicates that, although participants in our study used karmic belief as a cue when making trustworthiness judgment, it did not track actual trustworthiness. The absence of an association between karmic belief and actual trustworthy behavior among participants in the trustee role may seem to contradict prior research which found that reminders of karma increased generous behavior in dictator games (White et al., 2019; Willard et al., 2020). However, note that our study did not involve any conspicuous reminders of karma – there was only a single question asking if participants believe in karma. Thus, it may be that those who believe in karma would behave in a more trustworthy manner only when the concept is made salient.

Although we had found that karma believers were perceived as more trustworthy, the psychological explanation(s) for this finding remains an open question. One possible explanation is that karma is seen as a source of supernatural justice and that individuals who believe in karma are expected to behave in a more trustworthy manner in order to avoid karmic ]punishment and/or to reap karmic rewards. 

The research is here.

Principles of karmic accounting: How our intuitive moral sense balances rights and wrongs

Johnson, S. G. B., & Ahn, J.
(2019, September 10).
PsyArXiv
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xetwg

Abstract

We are all saints and sinners: Some of our actions benefit other people, while other actions harm people. How do people balance moral rights against moral wrongs when evaluating others’ actions? Across 9 studies, we contrast the predictions of three conceptions of intuitive morality—outcome- based (utilitarian), act-based (deontologist), and person-based (virtue ethics) approaches. Although good acts can partly offset bad acts—consistent with utilitarianism—they do so incompletely and in a manner relatively insensitive to magnitude, but sensitive to temporal order and the match between who is helped and harmed. Inferences about personal moral character best predicted blame judgments, explaining variance across items and across participants. However, there was modest evidence for both deontological and utilitarian processes too. These findings contribute to conversations about moral psychology and person perception, and may have policy implications.

Here is the beginning of the General Discussion:

Much  of  our  behavior  is  tinged  with  shades  of  morality. How  third-parties  judge  those behaviors has numerous social consequences: People judged as behaving immorally can be socially ostracized,  less  interpersonally  attractive,  and  less  able  to  take  advantage  of  win–win  agreements. Indeed, our desire to avoid ignominy and maintain our moral reputations motivate much of our social behavior. But on the other hand, moral judgment is subject to a variety of heuristics and biases that appear  to  violate  normative  moral  theories  and  lead  to  inconsistency  (Bartels,  Bauman,  Cushman, Pizarro, & McGraw, 2015; Sunstein, 2005).  Despite the dominating influence of moral judgment in everyday social cognition, little is known about how judgments of individual acts scale up into broader judgments  about  sequences  of  actions,  such  as  moral  offsetting  (a  morally  bad  act  motivates  a subsequent morally good act) or self-licensing (a morally good act motivates a subsequent morally bad act). That is, we need a theory of karmic accounting—how rights and wrongs add up in moral judgment.

Thinking about Karma and God reduces believers’ selfishness in anonymous dictator games

Cindel White John Kelly Azim Shariff Ara Norenzayan

Preprint

Originally posted on June 23, 2018

Abstract

In a novel supernatural framing paradigm, three repeated-measures experiments (N = 2347) examined whether thinking about Karma and God increases generosity in anonymous dictator games. We found that (1) thinking about Karma increased generosity in karmic believers across religious affiliations, including Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and non-religious Americans; (2) thinking about God also increased generosity among believers in God (but not among non-believers), replicating previous findings; and (3) thinking about both Karma and God shifted participants’ initially selfish offers towards fairness, but had no effect on already fair offers. Contrary to hypotheses, ratings of supernatural punitiveness did not predict greater generosity. These supernatural framing effects were obtained and replicated in high-powered, pre-registered experiments and remained robust to several methodological checks, including hypothesis guessing, game familiarity, demographic variables, and variation in data exclusion criteria.

The article is here.