Joaana Blogowska and Vassilis Saroglou work together on the piece “Religious Fundamentalism and Limited Prosociality as a Function of the Target” to ask the question, does religion imply altruism or prejudice and violence? To answer this question, they dive into two traditional claims. One of which is the idea that being really religious implies prosocial tendencies. Prosocial, since I was unaware of its meaning before reading this article, applies to voluntary behavior that is beneficial and in pursuit of doing good and promoting social acceptance. The second historical claim is that religious fundamentalism is associated with prejudice, since its roots tend to be resting in right-wing authoritarianism. The authors compile the data associated with these two claims and try to find if indeed religious fundamentalism also predicts prosociality. Another facet of these claims is that they only apply to certain groups and individuals. In the case of religious fundamentalism, predicted prosociality was found in regards to nonfeminists, rather than feminists and to friends, but not to strangers.

In order to answer their research questions, the authors took on two different experiments. In the first, the data being collected is that of self identity. A group of participating Polish college students were randomly assigned either an experiment or a control condition, and were given surveys that were later evaluated to find how their self identities affect their prosociality. Experiment two was an extension of experiment one, but also looked into the distinction between prosociality toward friends rather than strangers. The participants in this study are from a less random pool because they were either Catholics or had received a catholic education. The conclusion from these experiments is that people are more willing to help people they know rather than strangers, but this is not exclusive to religious fundamentalist groups. Therefor, the argument is that this also fails to contribute to violent tendencies There is, however, data showing that a religious fundamentalists do show some prejudice and hostility.

Although this study was pretty abstract and contained language I wasn’t familiar with, I thought it was really interesting. A stereotype that typically aligns with fundamentalist groups is the idea of violence within such communities. This was an interesting perspective to to take on how violence is expressed, perhaps where it comes from, and if it really exists among typical fundamentalist groups.

Blogowska, J., & Saroglou, V. (2011). Religious Fundamentalism and Limited Prosociality as a Function of the Target. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion,50(1), 44-60. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01551.x