Moralistic supernatural punishment is probably not associated with social complexity

Lightner, Aaron D.; Bendixen, Theiss; Purzycki, Benjamin Grant

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2022.10.006

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Some advocates define the term 'high gods' as 'gods who cared about cooperativeand harmonyenhancing behavior' (Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2010: 124); others defined 'high gods' as deities specifically responsible for creating reality, and who may or may not be 'specifically supportive of human morality' (Swanson, 1960). Confusions of this type put researchers' ability to falsify causal hypotheses about religious beliefs and cooperation at risk since, if a correlation was not discovered in a dataset, the former circular definition warrants the inference that the dataset represented a 'low' not a 'high' god (Nichols et al (2020: 4), and see Table 1 in that paper for similar logical problems in this subfield; see Lightner et al (2023), on the empirical implications of these conflations). Below, Section 5 analyses theoretical difficulties as found in the topical areas of non-human culture and language.…”

Section: Topical Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

Nichols,

Charbonneau,

Chellappoo

et al. 2024

Evolut. Hum. Sci.

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The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution, and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments, and field studies. Though numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science, and interdisciplinary researchers.

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Section: Topical Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

Nichols,

Charbonneau,

Chellappoo

et al. 2024

Evolut. Hum. Sci.

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“…However, database studies of coded ethnographic sources suffer from a variety of biases, including systematic missingness in focal variables (Beheim et al, 2021 ; Purzycki et al, 2022a ), non-representative sampling of cultural groups and antiquated data coding schemes (e.g. whether a moralising god is also by necessity a high god , that is a creator deity; see Lightner et al, 2022 ; Purzycki and McKay, 2023 ; Watts et al, 2015 ). Further, surveys of the ethnographic record (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Boehm, 2008 ; Bendixen and Purzycki, 2023a ; Purzycki and McNamara, 2016 ; Rossano, 2007 ; Swanson, 1960 ) as well as recent individual-level ethnographic inquiries (e.g. Bendixen et al, 2023a ; Purzycki, 2011 , 2013 , 2016 ; Purzycki et al, 2022c ; Singh et al, 2021 ; Townsend et al, 2020 ) strongly indicate that notions of supernatural punishment of moral norm violations are common even in smaller-scale societies, calling into question the reliability of databases that suggest otherwise (Lightner et al, 2022 ; Purzycki and McKay, 2023 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2023

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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 behavior, 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 behavior. 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 behavioral and ethnographically rich methods.

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“…They long appeared confined to large-scale and socially complex societies Johnson, 2005;Norenzayan et al, 2016;Peoples et al, 2016;Roes & Raymond, 2003), but recent findings suggest otherwise. The idea that moralistic supernatural punishment is more frequent in large-scale societies was based on datasets biased toward under-detecting moralizing gods in smaller societies Lightner et al, 2022a;Purzycki et al, 2023). More recent findings, including quantitative ethnographies (Purzycki, 2016;Singh et al, 2021;Townsend et al, 2020), surveys of the ethnographic record (Boehm, 2008;Watts et al, 2015), and psychological experiments conducted across 15 field sites Purzycki, Willard, et al, 2022), show that beliefs in moralizing gods recur in small-scale societies, as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

Fitouchi¹,

Singh²,

André³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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What explains the ubiquity and cultural success of prosocial religions? Leading accounts argue that prosocial religions evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that prosocial religious beliefs are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that prosocial religions, including beliefs in moralizing gods, develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve their goals in within-group, strategic interactions. People have a fitness interest in controlling others’ cooperation—either to extort benefits from others or to gain reputational benefits for protecting the public good. Moreover, they intuitively infer that other people could be deterred from cheating if they feared supernatural punishment. Thus, people endorse supernatural punishment beliefs to manipulate others into cooperating. Prosocial religions emerge from a dynamic of mutual monitoring, in which each individual, lacking confidence in the cooperativeness of conspecifics, attempts to incentivize their cooperation by endorsing beliefs in supernatural punishment. We show how variants of this incentive structure explain the variety of cultural attractors towards which supernatural punishment converges—including extractive religions that extort benefits from exploited individuals, prosocial religions geared toward mutual benefit, and moralized forms of prosocial religion where belief in moralizing gods is itself a moral duty. We review cross- disciplinary evidence for nine predictions of this account and use it to explain the decline of prosocial religions in modern societies. Prosocial religious beliefs seem endorsed as long as people believe them necessary to ensure other people’s cooperation, regardless of their objective effectiveness in doing so.

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Moralistic supernatural punishment is probably not associated with social complexity

Cited by 12 publications

References 69 publications

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

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

Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

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