Predictive modeling of religiosity, prosociality, and moralizing in 295,000 individuals from European and non-European populations

Abstract

Why do moral religions exist? An influential psychological explanation is that religious beliefs in supernatural punishment is cultural group adaptation enhancing prosocial attitudes and thereby large-scale cooperation. An alternative explanation is that religiosity is an individual strategy that results from high level of mistrust and the need for individuals to control others’ behaviors through moralizing. Existing evidence is mixed but most works are limited by sample size and generalizability issues. The present study overcomes these limitations by applying k-fold cross-validation on multivariate modeling of data from >295,000 individuals in 108 countries of the World Values Surveys and the European Value Study. First, this methodology reveals no evidence that European and non-European religious people invest more in collective actions and are more trustful of unrelated conspecifics. Instead, the individuals’ level of religiosity is found to be weakly but positively associated with social mistrust and negatively associated with the production of behaviors, which benefit unrelated members of the large-scale community. Second, our models show that individual variation in religiosity is well explained by the interaction of increased levels of social mistrust and increased needs to moralize other people’s sexual behaviors. Finally, stratified k-fold cross-validation demonstrates that the structures of these association patterns are robust to sampling variability and reliable enough to generalize to out-of-sample data.

Moral disciplining: the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

“…In line with this idea, recent analyses of the World Value Survey and European Social study (N > 200,000) suggest that puritanical moralizations and religiosity are predicted by people's social mistrust, i.e. the belief that surrounding individuals are not spontaneously cooperativeand thus need to be controlled and disciplined to behave cooperatively (Jacquet et al, 2021; see Nettle & Saxe, 2021 for the related valorization of authority). This also allows to make sense of the apparently paradoxical findings that less self-controlled groups are more likely to exhibit puritanical values.…”

“…Mate-guarding surely partly underlies many sexual restrictions, and is consistent with the frequent double-standard favoring men in the moralization of sexual promiscuity (Broude & Greene, 1976;Dabhoiwala, 2012;Mernissi, 2011). Consistent with the Reproductive Religiosity Model, individuals with a monogamous reproductive strategy more harshly oppose sexual promiscuity (Weeden & Kurzban, 2016) and its facilitators (e.g., drugs; Kurzban et al, 2010;Quintelier et al, 2013), and seem to use religion to facilitate and encourage monogamous pair-bonding (Baumard & Chevallier, 2015;Hone et al, 2020;Jacquet et al, 2021;Moon, 2021;Moon et al, 2019;Weeden et al, 2008;. However, these accounts fail to sufficiently explain the more general condemnation of hedonic excesses (e.g., gluttony, drinking), intemperance, and lack of self-discipline beyond sexuality -promiscuous impulses are only one of the many short-term-oriented tendencies that puritanical morality condemns.…”

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].…”

The Cultural Evolution of Religion and Cooperation

“…However, a growing body of literature has objected to the liberal use of lifehistory theory in many corners of the social sciences, specifically taking issue with the notion that environmental stress versus affluence evokes "fast" vs. "slow" behavioral strategies respectively (i.e., investment in short-term vs. long-term material and reproductive goals) (e.g., Nettle and Frankenhuis, 2020). This is the variant of life-history theory to which Baumard and Boyer (2013) generally appeal (see also Baumard and Chevallier, 2015;Jacquet et al, 2021), warranting at least some skepticism about their argument on theoretical grounds. Moreover, using cross-cultural, individual-level data, Purzycki et al (2018c) did not find clear empirical support for the key causal path from material (in)security to locally relevant deities' moral salience, knowledge breadth, or punitiveness.…”