Religiosity and cooperation: The COVID-19 pandemic in Slovenia

Abstract

We researched the COVID-19 pandemic as a give-some social dilemma. The success of solving the dilemma depends on an adequate proportion of cooperative actors. We were interested in the difference between how religious and non-religious Slovenian citizens reported their level of cooperation with government measures aimed at limiting the spread of the virus during the pandemic. Our research shows that during the first wave of the epidemic in Slovenia, religious citizens were slightly more cooperative than non-religious citizens. However, this statistically significant difference was not the consequence of religiosity per se. Regression analysis suggests that the observable difference was due to factors such as age, gender, concern about health, and trust in the ruling government. We explain the effect of these factors in light of the existing corpus of knowledge about social dilemmas.