Robert Hoffmann: Department of Economics, Nottingham University Business School, The University of Nottingham

Huntington’s notion of a clash of cultures has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. In particular, religious differences as well as religious fundamentalism have been identified as crucial dimension of present culture clashes. We conducted a study to explore to what extent different religions and religiosity affect the economic interactions between individuals as a test of this notion. The study is based on religious attitude surveys and incentivised economic experiments with repeated prisoner’s dilemma play among Malaysian subjects. The multi-ethnic nature of Malaysia is ideally suited to match subjects for game play from the world’s major religions (Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Buddhism) while holding other socio-economic factors constant.