The economic value of thoughts and prayers

The increasingly clichéd response to any tragedy is to offer 'thoughts and prayers' to the victims and their loved ones. The cynical among us note that this is done in order to make the well-wisher feel better. But, is the offer of thoughts and prayers valued by the recipients? That is the question that this recent article by Linda Thunström (University of Wyoming) and Shiri Noy (Denison University), published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sought to address.

Now, obviously, thoughts and prayers are not traded in markets (yet!). So, there is no market price for these services. That means that a non-market valuation techniques is required. Thunström and Noy used an experiment to determine the value that people placed on receiving thoughts and prayers, which could be positive or negative:

Participants were told that a stranger would receive their description and offer a gesture of support in response. We applied a between-subjects study design and Christians and nonreligious participants were randomized into 1 of 4 conditions (C1 to C4). They participated in a [willingness-to-pay]-elicitation mechanism where they could exchange some or all of their $5 for supportive thoughts from a Christian stranger (C1), thoughts from an atheist stranger (C2), prayers from a Christian stranger (C3), or prayers from a priest (C4).

Essentially, the participants could give up some of the $5 they received for participating in the experiment, in exchange for thoughts and prayers from others. The results were interesting. They found that:

...on average, Christians value prayers from a priest at $7.17... and prayers from a Christian stranger at $4.36... In contrast, the nonreligious are “prayer averse”: on average, they are willing to pay $3.54... for a Christian stranger not to pray for them... Likewise, they are willing to pay a priest $1.66... not to pray for them...

So, thoughts and prayers have positive value for Christians (but interestingly, only from other Christians and not from an atheist), but have negative value for the non-religious (which included Atheists and Agnostics). In some further analysis, they found that Christians were more likely to agree with statements about the helpfulness of thoughts and prayers. That suggests that Christians are willing to pay for thoughts and prayers because they expect those thoughts and prayers to convey benefits on them.

That reminded me of this 2010 article (open access) by Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, published in the journal Economic Inquiry. The article is entitled "The effect of prayer on God’s attitude toward mankind", and Heckman concludes that:

A little prayer does no good and may make things worse. Much prayer helps a lot.

Presumably, that also demonstrates the benefits of prayer. [*]

[HT for the Thunström and Noy article: Elizabeth Oldfield in Unherd, via Marginal Revolution]

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[*] Actually, the article by Heckman isn't serious. He was using the analysis of prayer to illustrate the foolishness of this earlier article by R.S. Singh, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1977.