twitter

Thursday, 11 February 2016

Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16980.html
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature16980
Received
Accepted
Published online

Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded1, 2. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms3, 4. Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers5, 6, 7, 8. We tested this hypothesis using extensive ethnographic interviews and two behavioural games designed to measure impartial rule-following among people (n = 591, observations = 35,400) from eight diverse communities from around the world: (1) inland Tanna, Vanuatu; (2) coastal Tanna, Vanuatu; (3) Yasawa, Fiji; (4) Lovu, Fiji; (5) Pesqueiro, Brazil; (6) Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius; (7) the Tyva Republic (Siberia), Russia; and (8) Hadzaland, Tanzania. Participants reported adherence to a wide array of world religious traditions including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as notably diverse local traditions, including animism and ancestor worship. Holding a range of relevant variables constant, the higher participants rated their moralistic gods as punitive and knowledgeable about human thoughts and actions, the more coins they allocated to geographically distant co-religionist strangers relative to both themselves and local co-religionists. Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality.

At a glance

Figures

First | 1-2 of 8 | Last
left
  1. The random allocation game.
    Figure 1
  2. Allocations to distant co-religionists increase as a function of moralistic gods’ punishment.
    Figure 2
  3. Log odds ratios with 95% confidence interval plots of the influence of key variables on the odds that a coin goes into the cup for the distant co-religionist.
    Figure 3
  4. Map of the eight field site locations.
    Extended Data Fig. 1
  5. Proportion of sample listing moral and virtue items for moralistic and local gods’ dislikes and likes by site.
    Extended Data Fig. 2
  6. Mean moralistic and local gods’ knowledge and punishment scales by site.
    Extended Data Fig. 3
  7. Plot of differences between size of actual allocations and allocations from binomially distributed sample of the same size.
    Extended Data Fig. 4
  8. Per cent of sample by allocation amount to distant cup in local co-religionist (grey) and self games (black) as compared to binomial distribution (white).
    Extended Data Fig. 5
right
Posted by at