ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 195 citations in OpenAlex.
- Instability of cooperation based on fictitious belief: an experiment with artificial supernatural punishment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The co-occurrence of ingroup and outgroup prosociality across 121 societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- The social learning and development of intra- and inter-ethnic sharing norms in the Congo Basin.PloS one · 2026Article
- The emergence of a new pilgrimage as an assurance game.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Witchcraft, Envy, and Norm Enforcement in Mauritius.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Intuitive moral bias favors the religiously faithful.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evidence of direct and indirect reciprocity in network-structured economic games.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Material insecurity and religiosity: A causal analysis.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Exploring causality from observational data: An example assessing whether religiosity promotes cooperation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Distinguishing Intergroup and Long-Distance Relationships.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Review
- Misrepresentation of group contributions undermines conditional cooperation in a human decision making experiment.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Advertising cooperative phenotype through costly signals facilitates collective action.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- How prosocial behaviors are maintained in China: The relationship between communist authority and prosociality.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The social learning and development of intra- and inter-ethnic sharing norms in the Congo Basin: A registered report protocol.PloS one · 2022Article
- Cultural similarity among coreligionists within and between countries.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world.Nature communications · 2021Article
- The sex premium in religiously motivated moral judgment.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
20 authors at 16 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.