Serious concerns about research quality have catalysed a number of reform initiatives intended to improve transparency and reproducibility and thus facilitate self-correction, increase efficiency and enhance research credibility. Meta-research has evaluated the merits of some individual initiatives; however, this may not capture broader trends reflecting the cumulative contribution of these efforts. In this study, we manually examined a random sample of 250 articles in order to estimate the prevalence of a range of transparency and reproducibility-related indicators in the social sciences literature published between 2014 and 2017. Few articles indicated availability of materials (16/151, 11% [95% confidence interval, 7% to 16%]), protocols (0/156, 0% [0% to 1%]), raw data (11/156, 7% [2% to 13%]) or analysis scripts (2/156, 1% [0% to 3%]), and no studies were pre-registered (0/156, 0% [0% to 1%]). Some articles explicitly disclosed funding sources (or lack of; 74/236, 31% [25% to 37%]) and some declared no conflicts of interest (36/236, 15% [11% to 20%]). Replication studies were rare (2/156, 1% [0% to 3%]). Few studies were included in evidence synthesis via systematic review (17/151, 11% [7% to 16%]) or meta-analysis (2/151, 1% [0% to 3%]). Less than half the articles were publicly available (101/250, 40% [34% to 47%]). Minimal adoption of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices could be undermining the credibility and efficiency of social science research. The present study establishes a baseline that can be revisited in the future to assess progress.

Serious concerns about research quality have catalyzed a number of reform initiatives intended to improve transparency and reproducibility and thus facilitate self-correction, increase efficiency, and enhance research credibility. Meta-research has evaluated the merits of some individual initiatives; however, this may not capture broader trends reflecting the cumulative contribution of these efforts. In this study, we manually examined a random sample of 250 articles in order to estimate the prevalence of a range of transparency and reproducibility-related indicators in the social sciences literature published between 2014-2017. Few articles indicated availability of materials (16/151, 11% [95% confidence interval, 7% to 16%]), protocols (0/156, 0% [0% to 1%]), raw data (11/156, 7% [2% to 13%]), or analysis scripts (2/156, 1% [0% to 3%]), and no studies were pre-registered (0/156, 0% [0% to 1%]). Some articles explicitly disclosed funding sources (or lack of; 74/236, 31% [25% to 37%]) and some declared no conflicts of interest (36/236, 15% [11% to 20%]). Replication studies were rare (2/156, 1% [0% to 3%]). Few studies were included in evidence synthesis via systematic review (17/151, 11% [7% to 16%]) or meta-analysis (2/151, 1% [0% to 3%]). Less than half the articles were publicly available (101/250, 40% [34% to 47%]). Minimal adoption of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices could be undermining the credibility and efficiency of social science research. The present study establishes a baseline that can be revisited in the future to assess progress.

In a heated debate about the proximity of COVID-19 herd immunity, White House health advisor Dr Scott Atlas proclaimed 'You're supposed to believe the science, and I'm telling you the science' 1 . A group of infectious disease experts and former colleagues from Stanford, however, publicly criticized Dr Atlas, who is a radiologist, for spreading 'falsehoods and misrepresentation of science' through his statements about face masks, social distancing and the safety of community transmission 2 . In the 2020 pandemic crisis, all eyes turned to scientific experts to provide advice, guidelines and remedies; from COVID-19 alarmists to sceptics, appeal to scientific authority appeared a prevalent strategy on both sides of the political spectrum. Please see the Supplementary Information for a short commentary on how the current work might relate to the COVID-19 situation.A large body of research has shown that the credibility of a statement is heavily influenced by the perceived credibility of its source [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Children and adults are sensitive to the past track record of informants [11][12][13][14][15][16] , evidence of their benevolence toward the recipient of testimony [17][18][19] , as well as how credible the information is at face value 20,21 . From an evolutionary perspective, deference to credible authorities such as teachers, doctors and scientists is an adaptive strategy that enables effective cultural learning and knowledge transmission [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] . Indeed, if the source is considered a trusted expert, people are willing to believe claims from that source without fully understanding them. We dub this 'the Einstein effect'; people simply accept that E = mc 2 and that antibiotics can help cure pneumonia because credible authorities such as Einstein and their doctor say so, without actually understanding what these statements truly entail.Knowing that a statement originates from an epistemic authority may thus increase the likelihood of opaque messages being interpreted as meaningful and profound. According to Sperber 29 , in some cases, incomprehensible statements from credible sources may be appreciated not just in spite of, but by virtue of their incomprehensibility, as exemplified by the speech of spiritual or intellectual gurus (the 'Guru effect'). Here, we investigate to what extent different epistemic authorities affect the perceived value of nonsensical information. To this end, we contrasted judgements of gobbledegook spoken by a spiritual leader with gobbledegook spoken

Cross-cultural beliefs about gods’ concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods’ concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the “god-problem problem”: to the extent that gods are concerned with local socioecological problems, which criteria does a problem need to satisfy in order to become an object of supernatural attention? We offer some preliminary solutions to this puzzle, which leads to a related, but often-overlooked, question: granted that features of religions may culturally evolve to adaptively fit to and resolve aspects of the local socioecological environment, what are the psychological processes through which this adaptation could occur? We wager that in order to answer the question satisfactorily, contemporary evolutionary approaches need to work together. Psychologically, the socioecological environment provides the initial impetus for a belief or practice by increasing the cognitive salience of a corresponding local problem and its costs. This increased receptivity makes such ideas and corollary behaviors easier to learn and transmit along the routes posited by dual-inheritance theorists. Behaviors feed back to beliefs and can offset the costs of social life in a variety of ways. As such, examining how cognition, social learning, behavior, and ecological pressures inform each other is especially crucial for understanding the persistence, diffusion, and evolution of religious ideas and practices.

While appeals to gods and spirits are ubiquitous throughout human societies past and present, deities’ postulated concerns vary across populations. How does the content of beliefs about and appeals to gods vary across groups, and what accounts for this variation? With particular emphasis on locally important deities, we develop a novel cultural evolutionary account that includes a set of predictive criteria for what deities will be associated with in various socioecological contexts. We then apply these criteria in an analysis of individual-level ethnographic free-list data on what pleases and angers locally relevant deities from eight diverse societies. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative approaches to cross-cultural variation in god beliefs and appeals fare against our findings and close by considering some key implications of our methods and findings for the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion.