You better think about Buddha! Buddhist priming as promoting prosociality and reducing prejudice.

Clobert, Magali [UCL] Saroglou, Vassilis [UCL] Hwang, Kwang-Kuo [National Taiwan University]

Does Buddhism really promote tolerance and prosociality? Based on theoretical and empirical cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence, we hypothesized that Buddhist concepts, in difference from those of Christian religion, foster not only prosociality but also tolerance. In Experiment 1, Westerners of Christian tradition (N = 128) subliminally primed with Buddhist words showed greater prosociality and lower implicit ethnic and religious prejudice versus those primed with neutral or Christian words. This effect was mediated by increased compassion. In Experiment 2, among Taiwanese of Buddhist/Taoist tradition (N = 122), both Buddhist and Christian primes increased prosociality compared with neutral primes, but only Buddhist primes decreased ethnic and religious prejudice. Tolerance of contradiction mediated the positive effect of Buddhism on reducing religious prejudice. These results suggest that the general idea that religion paradoxically promotes both proscociality and prejudice lacks cross-cultural sensitivity: Buddhism consistently promotes positive social attitudes and behaviors, even with respect to outgroups.