Religion and markets are good for you

My favorite things to ridicule on this blog are religion and marketing, and I generally wish people would be nicer to each other. Imagine, therefore, my surprise at learning that people in societies entrenched in world religions and with well developed market systems are far more likely to be kind and helpful to strangers.
The scientific journal Science tells the story of how members from 15 different societies were asked to play the three “economic games” Ultimatum, Dictator and Third-Party Punishment. As it turned out, people living in isolated non-religious societies without functioning market economies cheated more and were less likely to punish others who cheated.
“A good society is defined more by how people treat strangers than by how they treat those they know,” writes James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds. If this is true, religious, market-based economies are better than more “natural” ones.
Who knew?