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

Theiss Bendixen; Aaron D Lightner; Coren Apicella; Quentin Atkinson; Alexander Bolyanatz; Emma Cohen; Carla Handley; Joseph Henrich; Eva Kundtová Klocová; Carolyn Lesorogol; Sarah Mathew; Rita A McNamara; Cristina Moya; Ara Norenzayan; Caitlyn Placek; Montserrat Soler; Tom Vardy; Jonathan Weigel; Aiyana K Willard; Dimitris Xygalatas; Martin Lang; Benjamin Grant Purzycki

doi:10.1017/ehs.2023.15

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

Evol Hum Sci. 2023 May 12:5:e18. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2023.15. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Theiss Bendixen¹, Aaron D Lightner¹, Coren Apicella², Quentin Atkinson^{3

4}, Alexander Bolyanatz⁵, Emma Cohen⁶, Carla Handley⁷, Joseph Henrich⁸, Eva Kundtová Klocová⁹, Carolyn Lesorogol¹⁰, Sarah Mathew⁷, Rita A McNamara¹¹, Cristina Moya¹², Ara Norenzayan¹³, Caitlyn Placek¹⁴, Montserrat Soler¹⁵, Tom Vardy¹⁶, Jonathan Weigel¹⁷, Aiyana K Willard¹⁸, Dimitris Xygalatas^{19

20}, Martin Lang⁹, Benjamin Grant Purzycki¹

Affiliations

¹ Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
² Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
³ Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
⁴ Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
⁵ College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA.
⁶ Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
⁷ Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
⁸ Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
⁹ LEVYNA, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
¹⁰ Washington University in St Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
¹¹ School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
¹² Department of Anthropology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA.
¹³ Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
¹⁴ Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, USA.
¹⁵ Ob/Gyn and Women's Health Institute Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
¹⁶ Department of International Development, London School of Economics, London, UK.
¹⁷ Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA.
¹⁸ Brunel University, London, UK.
¹⁹ Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA.
²⁰ Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA.

Abstract

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 suggest 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 testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods.

Keywords: Behavioural economics; cognitive anthropology; cultural evolutionary psychology; evolutionary and cognitive science of religion; free-list.