Large-scale cooperation driven by reputation, not fear of divine punishment

Abstract

Reputational considerations favour cooperation and thus we expect less cooperation in larger communities where people are less well known to each other. Some argue that institutions are, therefore, necessary to coordinate large-scale cooperation, including moralizing religions that promote cooperation through the fear of divine punishment. Here, we use community size as a proxy for reputational concerns, and test whether people in small, stable communities are more cooperative than people in large, less stable communities in both religious and non-religious contexts. We conducted a donation game on a large naturalistic sample of 501 people in 17 communities, with varying religions or none, ranging from small villages to large cities in northwestern China. We found that more money was donated by those in small, stable communities, where reputation should be more salient. Religious practice was also associated with higher donations, but fear of divine punishment was not. In a second game on the same sample, decisions were private, giving donors the opportunity to cheat. We found that donors to religious institutions were not less likely to cheat, and community size was not important in this game. Results from the donation game suggest donations to both religious and non-religious institutions are being motivated by reputational considerations, and results from both games suggest fear of divine punishment is not important. This chimes with other studies suggesting social benefits rather than fear of punishment may be the more salient motive for cooperative behaviour in real-world settings.

How does residential mobility influence generalized trust?

“…Under this circumstance, the role of the reputation which is an important mechanism for forming trust or prosocial behavior will be greatly reduced. This was consistent with the results that reputational considerations will be more salient in small communities, which are also more stable as residents have lived there for a much longer time, and thus have a greater opportunity to get to know each other (Ge et al, 2019). However, this potential mechanism needs to be tested by future research.…”

“…An alternative explanation for the fact that residential mobility reduces generalized trust is the lack of reputational constraints in a fast-mobile society. The tendencies to monitor, spread, and manage each other’s reputation help explain the abundance of human cooperation with unrelated strangers (Ge et al, 2019; Wu et al, 2016). However, when we move from one place to another, it will cause the interruption of the original social network, the separation of the original interpersonal relationship, and the alienation of the original emotional connection.…”

Scarce and directly beneficial reputations support cooperation

“…One of the informal solutions proposed by the theory of indirect reciprocity (IR) is the establishment and maintenance of reputations that provide guidelines for selecting the right partners but also for distinctive actions towards interaction partners [7][8][9] . Empirical studies confirmed that cooperation can be established through the use of reputations that trigger conditional cooperative behaviour [10][11][12][13][14] .…”

Supernatural punishment beliefs as cognitively compelling tools of social control

“…Although scholars still debate over whether beliefs in moralizing gods in fact motivate cooperation [4,[6][7][8]27], an apparently unambiguous finding is that people believe that beliefs in moralizing gods make others more cooperative. Across 13 religiously diverse countries, participants intuitively judge that religious people are less likely than atheists to commit immoral acts (e.g.…”

“…According to a leading hypothesis, prosocial religious beliefs motivate people to cooperate [4,5], allowing their groups to outcompete others and fueling the spread of this package of group-functional cultural traits [5]. This accounts relies on the premise that religious beliefs produce large enough boosts to cooperation to substantially influence evolutionary dynamics-a sometimes contested empirical claim [6][7][8].…”