Project description
Exploring how religion influences economic decisions in Africa
Religion is a major part of life in Africa, especially in Ghana, where 96 % see it as vital to daily life. Households spend 15-20 % of their budgets on religious activities, more than on clothing or education. The project posits that religion can help individuals overcome psychological barriers, leading to better life decisions, such as taking loans for business expansion. The ERC-funded INVISIGODS project will assess whether emotions and psychology influence the demand for religious messages. The project will analyse 10 years of sermon texts, along with geocoded data on church branches, to determine whether churches compete with one another for members through secular interactions. Additionally, it will conduct a randomised control trial to investigate how receiving a prophecy impacts the profits of business owners.
Objective
Religion is big business in Africa. Religion is also poorly understood business. Almost 96% of Ghanaians agree with the statement “religion is important to my daily life”. They put their money where their mouths are. Expenditure surveys show that households spend 15-20% of their budgets on religious activities—more than is spent on clothes, school, or entertainment. What are they paying for? I hypothesize that individuals use religion as a tool to relax psychological constraints. Religion makes it easier for individuals to produce useful, if not necessarily correct, beliefs about themselves or their actions. For example, they may take out a loan to expand a business because they overestimate the returns to effort. Religious organizations also put members in touch with one another and these interactions may make the beliefs true. For example, co-religionists may patronize their fellow member’s newly expanded business, increasing the chances that the business will be a success. In this way, religion relaxes psychological constraints (low confidence in the example) and improves economic outcomes (business profits in the example). I test this hypothesis across three work packages measuring whether the demand for religious messages responds to their psychological usefulness; using text analysis on 10 years of sermons and geo-coded data on church branches to test whether churches compete with one another by attracting members for secular interactions; and conducting a randomized control trial to understand how receiving a prophecy affects business owner’s profits.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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1348 LOUVAIN LA NEUVE
Belgium
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