ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
The ecology of religious beliefs.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Target trial emulation shows that supported causal effects of religious attendance on well-being are selective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
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- Genetic diversity and population structure of non-descript cattle in South African smallholder systems.Frontiers in genetics · 2025Article
- The global relevance of locally grounded ethnobiology.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2024Article
- Biogeographical distributions of trickster animals.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Worldwide divergence of values.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Geography is not destiny: A quantitative test of Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Why did doctrinal religions first appear in the Northern Subtropical Zone?Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.PloS one · 2022Article
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- Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence test the phylogenetic inference of Viking-Age plant use.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Pathways to social inequality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- Resource Stress Predicts Changes in Religious Belief and Increases in Sharing Behavior.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Harsh environments promote alloparental care across human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.