Punitive gods, morality, and extended prosociality
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The cultural evolution of mechanisms stabilizing large-scale cooperation is a hotly debated topic. We propose that culturally evolved beliefs in moralistic gods interested in human affairs facilitate the extension of moral norms toward distant, unknown co-religionists, and that the effectiveness of such beliefs is confined to religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of outgroups with different supernatural commitments. The current study examined these proposition on a cross-cultural sample of 2,228 participants comprising 15 societies with various group size, mode of subsistence, and supernatural beliefs. Using Random Allocation Games (RAGs) and Dictator Games (DGs) where participants allocated money between various cup-dyads, we show that ratings of moralistic gods as omniscient and punitive stably predict larger allocations to cups belonging to geographically distant co-religionists. |
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