Shame and punishment: an international comparative study on the effects of religious affiliation and religiosity on attitudes to offending

This study investigates the effects of having a religious affiliation and of an individual’s level of religiosity on social norms in relation to victimless crimes. Two mechanisms are hypothesized to influence these norms: having a religious affiliation, via external sanctioning by others, and religiosity via internal sanctioning. In addition, it was predicted that the effects of internal sanctioning would be stronger than the effects of external sanctioning. To test these hypotheses, we used the data from the World Values Survey (WVS) 1981—2004. The final data set contains information on 128,243 respondents residing in 70 countries. The results of the multivariate analyses show that having a religious affiliation and a higher level of religiosity both result in a stronger condemnation of victimless crimes and that the effects of religiosity are stronger than the effects of belonging to a religious group.