ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Large-scale cooperation driven by reputation, not fear of divine punishment.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 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
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Instability of cooperation based on fictitious belief: an experiment with artificial supernatural punishment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Cultural differences in self-reported empathy in Indonesia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Indirect reciprocity undermines indirect reciprocity destabilizing large-scale cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Explaining the evolution of gossip.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reputation-surveillance model of mate guarding: community size and religious veiling.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- 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
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Neighbourhood wealth, not urbanicity, predicts prosociality towards strangers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Scarce and directly beneficial reputations support cooperation.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- How evolutionary behavioural sciences can help us understand behaviour in a pandemic.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2020Review
- Large-scale cooperation driven by reputation, not fear of divine punishment.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Reputational considerations favour cooperation and thus we expect less cooperation in larger communities where people are less well known to each other. Some argue that institutions are, therefore, necessary to coordinate large-scale cooperation, including moralizing religions that promote cooperation through the fear of divine punishment. Here, we use community size as a proxy for reputational concerns, and test whether people in small, stable communities are more cooperative than people in large, less stable communities in both religious and non-religious contexts. We conducted a donation game on a large naturalistic sample of 501 people in 17 communities, with varying religions or none, ranging from small villages to large cities in northwestern China. We found that more money was donated by those in small, stable communities, where reputation should be more salient. Religious practice was also associated with higher donations, but fear of divine punishment was not. In a second game on the same sample, decisions were private, giving donors the opportunity to cheat. We found that donors to religious institutions were not less likely to cheat, and community size was not important in this game. Results from the donation game suggest donations to both religious and non-religious institutions are being motivated by reputational considerations, and results from both games suggest fear of divine punishment is not important. This chimes with other studies suggesting social benefits rather than fear of punishment may be the more salient motive for cooperative behaviour in real-world settings.
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.