study_altruism_81103

Posted: 8/8/03

Churchgoers found to be more altruistic

By Hannah Lodwick

Associated Baptist Press

CHICAGO (ABP)–Good deeds may not get folks into heaven, but they are a pretty good indication of who is faithful, a recent study found.

Scientists at the National Opinion Research Center have determined that nothing inspires altruism except faith–not gender, race, social class, political affiliation or locale.

Americans on average do 109 altruistic acts each year, according to the study “Altruism in Contemporary America.” But people who attend a place of worship weekly–church, synagogue, mosque or temple–report doing an average of 128 good deeds a year. People who never attend perform only 96 acts of kindness on average.

In addition to worshippers, people who pray reportedly show more kindness than those who don't. The report said those who pray did three times as many acts of kindness as those who never pray.

Tom Smith, director of the two-year study, said one reason why faith-based acts of kindness proliferate is that the core values of all major world religions incorporate charity-related deeds in their beliefs.

“People who are actively engaged (in a religious community) help others,” Smith said. “What made a difference was attending church and praying more often. If we're actively engaged, we're a part of a religious community, and opportunities to help others come up more often as a member of a congregation.”

The research team began the study looking for predictors of altruistic acts–things like activity in social services, gender or rural values, Smith said. The fact faith supercedes other factors could involve what Smith called “opportunity structure.”

“We expected people in rural areas to have higher values, be more altruistic, but that was not the case,” Smith said. “If you live in a city, opportunities to do good deeds are more likely to turn up.”

For the first-of-its-kind report, Smith and his colleagues evaluated 1,366 people with a list of 15 “good deeds,” asking them how often they performed the acts in the past week, month and year. The deeds included giving food or money to a homeless person, volunteering, giving directions to a stranger, offering a bus or train seat to someone standing, and helping someone find a job.

The most common good deed–cited by 92.6 percent of respondents–was spending time talking to someone who felt depressed.

The 15 good deeds studied are commonly used in similar surveys. Researchers shied away from deeds that involve rare occurrences–saving someone from drowning, for example.

“We tried to pick things … that weren't rare, things you would have the opportunity to do in daily life,” Smith said.

While men and women were equally altruistic, women were much more likely to feel empathy than men. Forty-five percent of women felt disturbed by others' misfortunes, but only 25 percent of men reported the same feelings.

In fact, Smith said, gender made the only difference when it came to empathy.