Science, religion, folklore and behaviour

So, I've been reading a bit about Buddhism and science lately, and on the off chance something interesting would pop up, did a search for the religion on the arXiv pre-print site.

This rather odd paper turned up: 

On how religions could accidentally incite lies and violence: Folktales as a cultural transmitter 

The abstract:

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (\b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23; \b{eta}C_and_Lie_O= 1.47; \b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (\b{eta}B_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices-violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument. 

I think this group of Vietnamese researchers might have too much time on their hands, but it's still a bit interesting.   Here is a peculiar Vietnames folktale which they discuss in the introduction:

Folklore materials offer one of the most imaginative windows into the livelihood and psychology of people from different walks of life at a certain time. These colorful narratives bring to life the identities, practices, values, and norms of a culture from a bygone era that may provide insights on speech play and tongue-twisters (Nikolić & Bakarić, 2016), habitat quality of farmers (Møller, Morelli, & Tryjanowski, 2017), treatments for jaundice (Thenmozhi et al., 2018), and contemporary attitudes and beliefs (Michalopoulos & Xue, 2019). While the stories tend to honor the value of hard work, honesty, benevolence, and many other desirable virtues, many of such messages are undercut by actions that seem outlandish, morally questionable, or brutally violent (Alcantud-Diaz, 2010, 2014; Chima & Helen, 2015; Haar, 2005; Meehan, 1994; Victor, 1990). In a popular Vietnamese folktale known as “Story of a bird named bìm bịp (coucal),” a robber who repents on his killing and cuts open his chest to offer his heart to the Buddha gets a better ending than a Buddhist monk who has been religiously chaste for his whole life but fails to honor his promise to the robber—i.e. bringing the robber’s heart to the Buddha. In his quest for the robber’s missing heart, not only does the monk never reach enlightenment, but he also turns into a coucal, a bird in the cuckoo family (Figure 1)

On the one hand, the gory details of this story likely serve to highlight the literal determination and commitment of the robber to repentance, which is in line with the Buddhist teaching of turning around regardless of whichever wrong directions one has taken. On the other hand, it is puzzling how oral storytelling and later handwriting traditions have kept alive the graphic details—the images of the robber killing himself in the name of Buddhism, a religion largely known for its non-violence and compassion. Aiming to make sense of these apparent contradictions, this study looks at the behavior of Vietnamese folk characters as influenced by long-standing cultural and religious factors. The focus on the folkloristic realm facilitates the discovery of behavioral patterns that may otherwise escape our usual intuitions.  

 The next part of the paper - about a literature review of studies of the effect of religion on behaviour (usually in a Christian context) is pretty interesting, though:

To make sense of the relationship between religiosity and deviant behaviors, scholars from as far back as the 1960s have sought to measure how church membership or religious commitment could deter delinquent activities, though pieces of empirical evidence over the years remain inconclusive (Albrecht, Chadwick, & Alcorn, 1977; Hirschi & Stark, 1969; Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 1975; Tittle & Welch, 1983). In their influential study, Hirschi and Stark (1969) ask if the Christian punishment of hellfire for sinners can deter delinquent acts among the firm believers, and surprisingly find no connection between religiosity and juvenile delinquency. Subsequent studies tend to fall along two lines, either confirming the irrelevance of religion and deviance (Cochran & Akers, 1989; Tittle & Welch, 1983; Welch, Tittle, & Grasmick, 2006), or pointing out certain inhibiting effect of religiosity depending on the types of religious contexts (Benda, 2002; Corcoran, Pettinicchio, & Robbins, 2012; Evans, Cullen, Dunaway, & Burton Jr, 1995; Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 2017). Additional studies have looked at religious contexts beyond the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries
such as in South Korea and China but also reached inconsistent results on the religiosity–deviance relationship (Wang & Jang, 2018; Yun & Lee, 2016).

 Anyway, pretty interesting.