“Render Unto Caesar What Is Caesar's”: Religiosity and Taxpayers' Inclinations to Cheat

Abstract

Previous research on the relationship between religiosity and involvement in illegal behavior overlooks Hirschi and Stark's original concern with religion as a sanctioning system. While Hirschi and Stark proposed that religion affects compliance with the law by promising heaven and threatening damnation, this study suggests that its sanctions are self-imposed shame and socially-imposed embarrassment. Shame and embarrassment are compatible with a rational choice perspective on illegal behavior—they lower the expected utility of crime and, thus, its likelihood. These two threats stem from two conceptually distinct dimensions of religiosity. People strongly self-identified as religious are more likely to feel ashamed if they violate the law; those involved in a social network based on religion are more likely to be embarrassed. An adult sample's responses to a question concerning the likelihood of cheating on income taxes in the future tests these hypotheses. The threat of shame emanating from religious identity salience is a stronger deterrent than that of embarrassment.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 200 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.