Threat of hell fire linked to lower crime, study says

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People who believe in hell naturally enough don't want to go there. And they're more likely to steer clear of criminal behavior.

Such is the finding of a new study by a University of Oregon psychologist.

Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, psychologist Azim Shariff says that crime is lower in societies where the religious beliefs include a punitive component (e.g. eternal damnation).

Shariff studied 26 years of data involving 143,197 people from 67 countries. The data included belief in hell and heaven and crime numbers on homicide, rape, robbery, kidnapping, assault, drug-related crimes and other serious transgressions.

"The key finding is that, controlling for each other, a nation's rate of belief in hell predicts lower crime rates, but the nation's rate of belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates, and these are strong effects," Shariff said.

Shariff conducted a study last year that found undergraduate students are more likely to cheat when they believe in a forgiving God than they are when they believe in a punishing God. That study was published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.


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