Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies

Abstract

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to such mechanisms being constrained to the religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of religious outgroups. To test these hypotheses, we administered two behavioural experiments and a set of interviews to a sample of 2228 participants from 15 diverse populations. These populations included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage labourers, practicing Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, but also forms of animism and ancestor worship. Using the Random Allocation Game (RAG) and the Dictator Game (DG) in which individuals allocated money between themselves, local and geographically distant co-religionists, and religious outgroups, we found that higher ratings of gods as monitoring and punishing predicted decreased local favouritism (RAGs) and increased resource-sharing with distant co-religionists (DGs). The effects of punishing and monitoring gods on outgroup allocations revealed between-site variability, suggesting that in the absence of intergroup hostility, moralizing gods may be implicated in cooperative behaviour toward outgroups. These results provide support for the hypothesis that beliefs in monitoring and punitive gods help expand the circle of sustainable social interaction, and open questions about the treatment of religious outgroups.

Human large-scale cooperation as a product of competition between cultural groups

“…The Borana sampled, coming from the Waso region of northern Kenya, are strongly influenced by Islam, where a more generalized ethos of giving is emphasized. This alludes to the possibility that CGS may be operating on scales larger than what we have measured here, such as religious groups, which may partly explain cooperative norms extending across ethnic boundaries 16,18,46 . Consistent with ethnographic impressions, the Rendille are atypically cooperative with the Samburu (Fig.…”

Longer religious fasting increases support for Islamist parties: Evidence from Ramadan

“…Our study also contributes to a wider debate among scientists on the evolutionary study of religions (Boyer 2001, Bulbulia 2004, Norezanyan and Shariff 2008, Norezanyan 2013, Purzycki et al 2018, Lang et al 2019. One of the evolutionary approaches to the study of human (Sosis and Bulbulia 2011).…”

“…Those studies, however, rely on observational data which cannot safely establish the presence of a causal effect. Experimental studies show that priming participants by reminding them of God and holding beliefs in moralistic and punitive gods increase altruism (Norezanyan and Shariff 2008, Lang et al 2019, Purzycki et al 2016, Purzycki et al 2018, and that religious participants are more trustworthy compared with nonreligious participants (Tan andVogel 2008, Hall et al 2015). But those experiments do not manipulate directly of the cost of religious practices-it is of course close to impossible to do so in an experiment.…”

Preferences and constraints: The value of economic games for studying human sociality

“…whether moral values and belief in morally-concerned deities affect rule-following [36,[47][48][49][50][51].…”