No. Examining the “supernatural punishment theory” that postulates that religion increases cooperation because religious people fear retributions after their death, economists Ali M. Ahmed and Osvaldo Salas find “no significant behavioral differences between religious and nonreligious participants” when studying whether “religiosity has an effect on voluntary cooperation in the public goods game.”

In a dictator game, Eckel and Grossman (2004) examined differences in the amount and pattern of giving to secular charities in response to subsidies by self-identified religious and nonreligious participants. The results indicate no significant difference in either the amount or pattern of giving. Tan (2006) used the dictator game and the ultimatum game and similar to Eckel and Grossman (2004) he found that religiosity as a whole yield no significant influence in the experiments. Second, one paper has focused on whether religiosity affects cooperation. Orbell et al. (1992) used the prisoner’s dilemma game to test the hypothesis that religious people are more cooperative. They conducted their experiment in what was considered more religious and less religious towns. They found no general relationship between religious affiliation and cooperation.

The results of previous studies seem to point at one direction: that religiously do not have an impact on either generosity or cooperation…

The authors continue:

We arrive at the following observations. There are no significant differences between religious and nonreligious participants regardless of what country we are studying. Hence, in line with previous experimental results, we found no supporting evidence for the hypothesis that religiosity enhances cooperation.

HT: Barking up the wrong tree

That may explain why guerrillas play tag:

Gorillas lower on the social ladder were usually the taggers …The findings, Ross says, suggest that low-status gorillas use the game as a sort of ego boost. They can hit a high-status individual without repercussions, she says, and that gives them a feeling of superiority, even if it’s only temporary. And that means that gorillas are aware of inequities in their society, Ross says, marking the first time that such cognition has been observed in gorillas in a nonexperimental setting.

Via William Easterly:

The language a person speaks may impact his or her views of other people, according to a study on Israeli Arabs who speak both Hebrew and Arabic fluently. Researchers Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University and Robert Ward of Bangor University found that Israeli Arabs’ positive associations with their own community was lower when they were tested in Hebrew than when they were tested in Arabic.

For this study, the bilingual Arab Israelis took the implicit association test in both languages – Hebrew and Arabic – to see if the language they were using affected their biases about the names. The Arab Israeli volunteers found it easier to associate Arab names with “good” trait words and Jewish names with “bad” trait words than Arab names with “bad” trait words and Jewish names with “good” trait words. But this effect was much stronger when the test was given in Arabic; in the Hebrew session, they showed less of a positive bias toward Arab names over Jewish names. “The language we speak can change the way we think about other people,” says Ward. The results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.