The Cult of Theoi: Economic Uncertainty and Religion

Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our
attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards “Theoi” in the laboratory. The theory
we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal
contract with the source of uncertainty by sacrificing towards it. In our experiments, we create
the situation whereby individuals face an uncertain economic payback due to “Theoi” and we
allow participants to sacrifice towards this entity. Aggregate sacrifices amongst participants
are over 30% of all takings, increase with the level of humanistic labelling of Theoi and
decrease when participants share information or when the level of uncertainty is lower. The
findings imply that under circumstances of high uncertainty people are willing to sacrifice
large portions of their income even when this has no discernable effect on outcomes. Read the complete IZA paper here.