There are times when we can be sticklers for punishment, demanding retribution for even the smallest mistake.
But what drives us to behave this way?
That’s the question that Kellogg’s Maryam Kouchaki, along with Rajen A. Anderson of the University of Leeds and Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent, sought to investigate. Because punishment plays a large role in many major religious traditions, the researchers specifically focused on why, in some circumstances, religious people tend to be more punitive than nonreligious people.
In a series of studies spanning three countries and major world religions—the U.S. (Christianity), India (Hinduism) and Turkey (Islam)—the researchers found that religious people are indeed more inclined to punish minor offenses.
One of the main reasons for this, the researchers found, is that religious people are more likely to engage in slippery-slope thinking, which is the belief that even small and relatively benign decisions will trigger a cascade of increasingly negative missteps and, ultimately, a bad outcome.
“[Religious people] expect that these smaller transgressions are going to escalate and, therefore, believe there needs to be a stronger punishment early on,” Kouchaki says.
Linking religion to slippery-slope thinking
Kouchaki and her colleagues began by teasing out the potential links between religiosity and slippery-slope thinking in a pilot study of nearly 400 people online.
The researchers assessed religiosity based on how each participant rated their belief in four supernatural agents—God, the devil, angels, and spirits or souls—and how important religion was to them, each on a scale of one to seven. They also determined the participants’ level of slippery-slope thinking based on how they rated the soundness of several different arguments such as, “If you allow the students to redo this test, they are going to want to redo every assignment for the rest of the year.”
The results confirmed that people who were more religious were more likely to engage in slippery-slope thinking.
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Then, in a separate study of 381 people in the U.S., the team evaluated six psychological factors that might connect religiosity to slippery-slope thinking, such as trust in others and political ideology. The two factors that best explained this connection were a belief in karma and the moralization of self-control. Many modern religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism incorporate the concept of supernatural karma—where good behavior is rewarded while bad behavior leads to negative consequences. And slippery-slope thinking follows a comparable line of reasoning as karma, though they aren’t exactly the same.
“Karma anticipates harm to the perpetrator in the form of cosmic justice, whereas slippery-slope thinking often anticipates harm to self and others or society more broadly due to those greater offenses,” the researchers write.
In a similar fashion, religions typically consider self-control a moral issue, heightening their concern that making one small “bad” decision will snowball into many even-worse decisions. For example, this mindset would hold that, for someone who is trying to lose weight, taking even a single 25-calorie bite of ice cream is immoral, believing that one bite will lead to many more bites.
“When people moralize self-control, they judge that initial [instance] when someone isn’t using it as more harmful,” Kouchaki says.
In additional studies, the researchers found that people who were more religious—and more engaged in slippery-slope thinking—were more likely to say they would try to stop a friend from making an initial “bad” decision, such as stealing $10 from the cash register at work. They were also more likely to punish minor violations—even when they did not view those minor violations as any more severe than did people who weren’t religious or slippery-slope thinkers.
“It’s the idea that in order to keep a potential moral issue from escalating, you really have to nip it in the bud,” Kouchaki says. “We all have that tendency to some extent, but here, we can see that people who are more religious are more likely to think that way.”
A cross-cultural link
To confirm that the association between religiosity and slippery-slope thinking wasn’t just a U.S.–Christian phenomenon, the researchers replicated their studies in India and Turkey. While the same link was observed in predominantly Hindu India, the finding was weaker in majority-Islam Turkey, which the researchers say underscores potential variability across cultures and religious traditions.
Major religions contain many different subgroups and traditions, so the strength of the link between religiosity and punishment will likely depend on how much specific teachings depend on the moralization of self-control, Kouchaki says.
The findings pave the way for future research to investigate the cultural factors and specific religious beliefs—like the nature of God—that influence slippery-slope thinking and its relationship to religiosity and punishment.
There’s a growing interest in how slippery-slope thinking may operate outside the context of religiosity and punishment, as well. For example, it may lead some individuals to feel that some aspects of the world are out of their control.
“If people feel that change is coming faster and more dramatically than they prefer, it might motivate efforts to resist and prevent those perceived changes,” Kouchaki says.