مذهب و رفتار اجتماعی مطلوب

Religion is a phenomenon evident in every culture. Different types of religion exist depending on the group of believers, the number of gods worshiped and the representations of these gods. However, one commonality the three largest religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) share is prosociality. They all are based on the notion of sharing, donating and helping others. In some of them, there is actually a prerequisite to support the image of the righteous. The purpose of this study is to investigate if religiosity predicts prosociality through a structured literature review. The key-words used were “religion”, “religiousness”, “prosociality”, “prosocial behaviour”, “blood donation” and other words related to these issues. The studies retrieved are dated from 2005 to 2010. The databases used were EBSCO, Sheffield University, PUBMED, and others of psychological and sociological interest. The main hypothesis of the study is that religiosity is positively correlated with prosociality. Secondary hypothesis is that religious priming, both subliminal and direct, will affect religious and, also, non- religious individuals in promoting and enhancing prosocial behaviour. Our conclusions are that (a) religiosity predicts prosociality and (b) priming affects both groups for different reasons.