Between Karma and Buddha: Prosocial Behavior among Mongolians in an Anonymous Economic Game

Norenzayan and colleagues argue that culturally evolved beliefs in monitoring and punishing supernatural agents contributed to the expansion of large-scale cooperation. Previous studies showed that Western participants primed with the God concept in anonymous dictator games tended to be more prosocial. However, there is a lack of studies that would investigate karmic beliefs and its effect on pro-sociality, thus expanding the scope of supernatural punishment hypothesis. The current study is one of the first attempts to address the question of belief in karma and its relation to prosocial behavior in a non-Western Buddhist culture. Using karma as a prime and a dictator game to measure generosity, the present study was carried out with Mongolians. Overall, Mongolians were rather generous. While we did not find the effect of the karma prime, there remains a possibility that this effect was masked by overall generosity. However, first, it is argued that the Mongolian Buddhist conceptions of karma (uiliin ur) and merit (buyan), intertwined with nomadic generosity norms, might have facilitated prosocial behavior among Mongolians. Second, results from regression analyses highlighted some variation between self-ascribed Buddhist and non-religious Mongolians, showing that Buddhist participants tended to give slightly more than non-religious participants. Third, the current results also indicate that belief in Buddha with God-like attributes, though espoused by a non-negligible number of Buddhist Mongolians, is not unanimous. And those who expressed this belief were no more generous than those who did not.