Who else but I knew that all things have a price and if not, economists will find one? I might be far from being alone on this one. It was a moment of reckoning for me when I recently learnt that there are some really smart researchers who calculated the going rate for thoughts and prayers offered in hard times.
Two U.S academics — Linda Thunström, an economist at the University of Wyoming and Shiri Noy, a sociologist at Denison University in Ohio — recently decided to put a value on “thoughts and prayers” to help understand the backlash that often follows when prominent figures express their sympathies to communities affected by catastrophes such as mass killings and natural disasters.
What they discovered was not only shocking to the world, but to them as well.
Christian participants were willing to part with money to receive thoughts and prayers from others, but the idea made nonbelievers, chiefly atheists and agnostics, recoil. Instead of shelling out to receive the gestures, on average, they will pay to avoid them.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study focused on 436 residents of North Carolina, the state most affected by Hurricane Florence last year.
The participants were given $5.00 “in support of their hardship” and asked how much, if any, they were willing to exchange to receive thoughts and prayers from strangers, most of whom were recruited over the internet.
When a participant agreed to a price for a gesture, one of the strangers received a note outlining the participant’s struggles and asking them to either pray or have them in their thoughts.
Prayers from clerics were worth $7.17 to the average Christian in need.
Prayers from less exalted Christians were valued at $4.36, while mere thoughts from another Christian were cheaper still at $3.27.
The researchers used statistical models to estimate prices people would pay above the $5 they had.
Atheists and agnostics, meanwhile, were averse to “thoughts and prayers”. On average, they will pay a priest $1.66 not to pray for them, and more than twice that, $3.54, to ensure a run-of-the-mill Christian similarly refrained.
According to Thunström, public figures increasingly face criticism from atheists and agnostics for their language around tragedies and some of them claimed that the phrase “thoughts and prayers…provokes something in them,”.
The study has been hailed by several people with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein calling it “a strong and powerful paper”.
Thunström said the study will help people understand the contemporary heated debates around people mere thinking and offering prayers for people struck by disasters as opposed to offering feasible solutions to stop these strokes of ill lucks. Whereas to some critics words are hollow and at worst detract from practical action that might help prevent further disasters, the study found that the value of a compassionate gesture depended overwhelmingly on a person’s beliefs.
“What our results show is that they have real value to some people, but not to others. These gestures need to be more targeted. If you are talking to a population that is more dominated by nonbelievers, you might not want to suggest a national prayer day,” she said.
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