Are Thoughts And Prayers Worse Than Nothing?
In the aftermath of widely-covered natural disasters, people who send victims their prayers might donate less money to actually help them than people who don’t pray.
On 25 August 2017, a hurricane shook the coast of Texas. With a diameter of 280 miles and winds of 130 mph, Hurricane Harvey devastated Port Aransas and Port O’Connor, small communities where the beaches are sandy white and the waterways are full of fish. Businesses and homes were stripped down to wooden studs, if not levelled, and the streets were littered with debris. Harvey kept on spinning, making its way into Texas and Louisiana, before being downgraded from a Category-4 hurricane to a tropical storm. What started as a bulldozing wind morphed into a torrential downpour: a swath of Texas saw up to 50 inches of rain, submerging the area, even disrupting a chemical plant to the point of explosion, sending noxious fumes into the sky. It took only a few days for the most powerful storm to rattle the coast of Texas since Hurricane Carla in 1961 to become the second-costliest in the history of the United States — behind only Hurricane Katrina.
Days later, president Donald Trump proclaimed the “National Day of Prayer for the Victims of Hurricane Harvey and for our National Response and Recovery Efforts.” Prayer is common in the US. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans pray daily, while fewer than a quarter seldom or never do. It’s no surprise, then, that athletes were quick to offer the victims of Hurricane Harvey their thoughts and prayers. So did celebrities. Even the Queen of England said her “thoughts and prayers were with those affected.”
As common as they were, thoughts and prayers didn’t cut the $120-billion check to pay the bill that Hurricane Harvey left behind. They also didn’t do anything to save the future victims of a future disaster. We are quick to say as much when the disaster is man-made and by the barrel of a gun, as former president Barack Obama often did in the aftermath of mass shootings. It might be appropriate to rebuke thoughts and prayers out of frustration, perhaps only if you don’t believe thoughts and prayers move the cogs of the universe.
Yet it might be more than appropriate, maybe even obligatory, if it turns out that thoughts and prayers are worse than nothing.
A new paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty looks at how intercessory thoughts and prayers affect prosocial behaviour, which is just a term for behaviour that helps others and society, such as donating to charity.
Using the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey as her laboratory, economist Linda Thunström found that “victims of natural disasters may be financially worse off from people expressing their sympathy through the act of praying.” In other words, her finding suggests that prayers, but not thoughts, can actually be worse than nothing.
Here’s how her experiment worked. Three months after Hurricane Harvey, religious and non-religious participants were given $5 and split evenly into three groups. One group was told about the damage Hurricane Harvey did and given the opportunity to donate a portion of their endowment to the victims through the Red Cross. The second group heard the same story, but they were told they could pray for the victims before they were given a chance to donate. The only difference between the second and third group was that the third group was given a moment to think, instead of pray, about the victims. Thunström called the groups treatment baseline, treatment pray, and treatment think.
Almost everyone in treatment think — the religious and non-religious alike — spent time thinking about the victims, but only the religious participants in treatment pray opted to send the victims their prayers. Thunström found that people who spent time thinking donated more than people who didn’t, although she cautioned that the difference was not statistically significant. The more interesting finding might be about intercessory prayer: people who prayed donated less than religious and non-religious people who didn’t. People who prayed also donated less than the religious people who only thought about the victims.
Thunström also did two follow-up experiments just weeks after Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina on 14 September 2018. In one of these, she ran the exact same experiment and found the same result, which is that intercessory prayer precedes lower donations. In the other, she ran a different experiment, which involved smaller donations and a starker choice: donate 50 cents or nothing. Here prayers didn’t seem to affect prosocial behaviour, raising the possibility that how you elicit a donation and for what amount can make or break the decision. Still, as we saw in Thunström’s other two experiments, prayers might crowd out donations when the decisions aren’t so stark and the amounts are larger — which might better describe what I’d consider to be the more realistic situation anyway.
Thunström has a formal theory of how intercessory thoughts and prayers affect donations in her paper. Anyone who’s dabbled in economics, but left the field for some reason, should find the theory either nostalgic or traumatic. To put it as simply as I can, the theory goes something like this: we donate to make ourselves feel good — what’s been called the “warm glow” — and to improve the recipient’s well being as we perceive it.
This last part is important because our perceptions of what helps or hurts increases or decreases the amount we ultimately choose to donate.
When it comes to our perceptions, and how they move the value of our donation, there are two factors at work: the empathy effect and the substitution effect. With the empathy effect, our donations go up as we become more aware of the recipient’s misfortune. When we give thought to a family of victims of Hurricane Harvey, for example, the empathy effect makes us feel their pain and increases our donation. But there comes a point when our empathy is maxed out, where the disaster is salient enough to have been burned into our memory, and no more thought can make it feel any more real. That’s when the substitution effect might dominate. This effect materializes when, for example, we perceive our prayers to be as helpful for victims as our dollars are, which lowers our donations the more we pray.
There will always be debate about which effect dominates in which context. As Thunström writes, “some argue moral actions [such as thoughts and prayers] are substitutes, [while] others argue they are complements.” But her research is an early look at a context in which prayers seem to be moral actions that are substitutable for others, such as donating. Depending on the context, and who’s on the receiving end of them, maybe thoughts and prayers are worse than nothing.
