Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures

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Authors

BENDIXEN Theiss LIGHTNER Aaron D APICELLA Coren ATKINSON Quentin BOLYANATZ Alexander COHEN Emma Elizabeth Ann HANDLEY Carla HENRICH Joseph KLOCOVÁ Eva LESOROGOL Carolyn MATHEW Sarah MCNAMARA Rita A MOYA Cristina NORENZAYAN Ara PLACEK Caitlyn SOLER Montserrat VARDY Tom WEIGEL Jonathan WILLARD Aiyana K XYGALATAS Dimitris LANG Martin PURZYCKI Benjamin Grant

Year of publication 2023
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Evolutionary Human Sciences
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/gods-are-watching-and-so-what-moralistic-supernatural-punishment-across-15-cultures/296B21A5369E7D2459E8634DB2DE3F50
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.15
Keywords Behavioural economics; cognitive anthropology; cultural evolutionary psychology; evolutionary and cognitive science of religion; free-list
Description Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to sug- gest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity’s explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods’ moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behaviour. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by test- ing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods.
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