Benjamin G Purzycki | Aarhus University (original) (raw)

Papers by Benjamin G Purzycki

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2020

The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessit... more The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study site selection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires ...

The Cognitive Science of Religion, 2019

Many aspects of religious rituals suggest they provide adaptive benefits. Studies across societie... more Many aspects of religious rituals suggest they provide adaptive benefits. Studies across societies consistently find that investments in ritual behaviour return high levels of cooperation. Another line of research finds that alloparental support to mothers increases maternal fertility and improves child outcomes. Although plausible, whether religious cooperation extends to alloparenting and/or affects child development remains unclear. Using 10 years of data collected from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), we test the predictions that church attendance is positively associated with social support and fertility (N = 8,207 to N = 8,209), and that social support is positively associated with fertility and child development (N = 1,766 to N = 6,561). Results show that: (i) relative to not attending, church attendance is positively related to a woman's social network support and aid from co-religionists, (ii) aid from co-religionists is associated with increased family size, while (iii) fertility declines with extra-religious social network support. Moreover, while extra-religious social network support decreased over time, co-religionist aid remained constant. These findings suggest that religious and secular networks differ in their longevity and have divergent influences on a woman's fertility. We find some suggestive evidence that support to mothers and aid from co-religionists is positively associated with a child's cognitive ability at later stages of development. Findings provide mixed support for the premise that ritual, such as church attendance, is part of a strategy that returns the high levels of support, fertility and improved child outcomes. Identifying the diversity and scope of cooperative breeding strategies across global religions presents an intriguing new horizon in the evolutionary study of religious systems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon... more The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society’s social ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game theoretical dilemmas and argue that contemporary approaches that emphasize cognition and/or social learning at the expense of social ecology are inadequate in accounting for cross-cultural variation in religious expression. Using ethnographic examples, we show that religions alleviate the costs of such dilemmas in a variety of ways by: 1) fostering beliefs that motivate and sustain beneficial practices; 2) incentivizing cooperative ventures; 3) encouraging ritual performances that minimize costly conflicts and bolster territorial conventions; 4) providing institutional forums to coordinate resource distributions; and 5) maintaining import...

Religion Brain & Behavior, 2022

The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular insti... more The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we conducted a systematic cross-cultural test (N = 1820; 14 societies) of the relationship between material insecurity (indexed by food insecurity) and religious commitment (indexed by both beliefs and practices). Moreover, we examined the relationship between material security and individuals' commitment to two types of deities (moralistic and local), thus providing the first simultaneous test of the existential security hypothesis across coexisting traditions. Our results indicate that while material insecurity is associated with greater commitment to moralistic deities, it predicts less commitment to local deity traditions.

Religion, Brain & Behavior , 2022

Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report... more Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed,

Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2022

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity m... more There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any
active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism
underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally
attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans
cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way,
and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral
concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization
bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals
in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We
find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that
local deities care about punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect
is stable even after holding beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities
constant. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among
Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally interested.
There is no evidence to suggest that this effect is due to direct
missionary contact. We posit that the “moralization bias of gods’ minds”
is part of a widespread but variable religious phenotype, and a
candidate mechanism that contributes to the well-recognized
association between religion and cooperation.

Scientific Data, 2016

A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, ... more A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, beliefs and behaviors. The bulk of this research, however, draws from coded qualitative ethnographies rather than from standardized methods specifically designed to measure religious beliefs and behaviors. Psychological data sets that examine religious thought and behavior in controlled conditions tend to be disproportionately sampled from student populations. Some cross-national databases employ standardized methods at the individual level, but are primarily focused on fully market integrated, state-level societies. The Evolution of Religion and Morality Project sought to generate a data set that systematically probed individual level measures sampling across a wider range of human populations. The set includes data from behavioral economic experiments and detailed surveys of demographics, religious beliefs and practices, material security, and intergroup perceptions. This paper describes the methods and variables, briefly introduces the sites and sampling techniques, notes inconsistencies across sites, and provides some basic reporting for the data set.

Using data collected in the Tyva Republic, the present work sheds light on the dynamic nature of ... more Using data collected in the Tyva Republic, the present work sheds light on the dynamic nature of religious cognition. In doing so, it reveals important patterns in the representation and distribution of religious concepts in this remote corner of the globe. This paper first introduces a cognitive ecological account of religion by examining human representational structures and how they interact with features of the natural environment. It then discusses this interaction in light of some Tyvan folktales followed by a report of how Tyvan spirit-masters’ forms correspond to type of landmark; anthropomorphic spirit-masters are associated with regions whereas zoomorphic spirits are associated with discrete resources. It concludes by highlighting a number of important questions that emerge from a cognitive ecological view of religious concepts.

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity m... more There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that local deities are concerned with punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect is stable even after holding constant the effects of beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally in...

Cognition

Identity fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacrifice. I... more Identity fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacrifice. It posits that while maintaining one's own individual identity, a deep affinity with one's group can contribute to sacrifice for that group. We test this and related hypotheses using a behavioral economic experiment designed to detect biased, self-interested favoritism among eight different populations ranging from foragers and horticulturalists to the fully market-integrated. We find that while individuals favor themselves on average, those with higher ingroup fusion sacrifice more money to other members of their ingroup who are unable to reciprocate. We also find that positive outgroup relations has a similar effect. Additionally, we assess a recently-posited interaction between ingroup and outgroup relations and show no consistent effect at the individual or sub-sample levels.

Current Anthropology, 2016

Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However... more Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However, the authors’ analysis methods, treatment of missing data, and source quality undermine the paper’s key conclusion that moralizing deities appear only after rapid increases in social complexity. First, their report fails to address the inherent ‘forward’ biases in first appearance dates of moralizing gods in the archaeo-historical record. When we minimally correct for this, the paper’s major finding reverses: moralizing gods precede the dramatic rises in social complexity. Second, the authors handle missing observations on moralizing gods by re-coding them as known absences. These values make up 61% of all outcome data. When missing data are handled appropriately, their result again reverses. Finally, inspections of the Seshat coding reveal systematic inaccuracies, inadequate vetting, and misleading claims.

Identify fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacriﬁce, wi... more Identify fusion theory has become a popular psychological explanation of costly self-sacriﬁce, with recent work positing that an interaction between negative outgroup relations and fusion with one’s ingroup which would lead to sacriﬁcial behavior that beneﬁts the ingroup. We test this hypothesis using a behavioral economic experiment designed to detect biased, self-interested favoritism among eight diﬀerent populations ranging from foragers and horticulturalists to the fully market-integrated. We ﬁnd that while individuals favor themselves on average, those with higher ingroup fusion sacriﬁce more money to others. However, the posited negative interaction between ingroup and outgroup relations shows no consistent eﬀects at the individual or population levels because outgroup fusion also predicts sacriﬁcing an opportunity to take more money. We conclude by suggesting that the fusion scale measures generalized sociability and/or is not necessarily able to precisely capture outgroup ho...

Since the earliest days of the social sciences, the relationship between religion and cooperation... more Since the earliest days of the social sciences, the relationship between religion and cooperation has been a central topic. In this chapter, we critically review some cultural evolutionary perspectives on religion and cooperation and consider how they frame the relationships among religious beliefs, behaviors, and the moral rules that motivate cooperation. We then offer an account of how religious systems can contribute to the stability of social life more generally, with cooperative dilemmas occupying a subset of a broader range of socioecological challenges that supernatural appeals might help resolve. We also provide a critical overview of popular methods used throughout much of the contemporary work on religion and cooperation. In doing so, we provide useful ways forward for testing how appeals to gods, spirits, and other supernatural forces can, in at least some cases, address locally important challenges to cooperation.

The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Religion, Brain & Behavior

Whether or not chimpanzees have the ability to mentally represent others' mental states or theory... more Whether or not chimpanzees have the ability to mentally represent others' mental states or theory of mind (ToM) has yet to be definitively established. This results from three problems. First, modular theory of mind accounts lead researchers to adopt an either/or approach to psychological faculties which obfuscates both within-and across-species variability. Second, present research continues to rely on the continued trend to polarize nature and nurture. Third, the bulk of the work compares humans with chimpanzees rather than looking at the entire range of primate species. I propose "degree approach" by way of the Integrated Causal Model which particularizes the key components to ToM while maintaining the tenets of modularity theory. According to this account, while chimpanzees may not have a ToM that is equal to our own, they nevertheless exhibit behaviors that are indeed indicative of having one as illustrated by comparison to other extant primate research.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2020

The Cognitive Science of Religion, 2019

Religion Brain & Behavior, 2022

Religion, Brain & Behavior , 2022

Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2022

Scientific Data, 2016

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity m... more There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that local deities are concerned with punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect is stable even after holding constant the effects of beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally in...

Cognition

Current Anthropology, 2016

The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Religion, Brain & Behavior

Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2023

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punit... more Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behavior, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods' moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behavior. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioral and ethnographically rich methods.

Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2023

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punit... more Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods' moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behaviour. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods.

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2020

Considerable work suggests that social and environmental pressures can influence religious commit... more Considerable work suggests that social and environmental pressures can influence religious commitment, the content of beliefs, and features of ritual. Some ecologically minded theories of religion posit that cross-cultural variation in beliefs and practices can be partly explained by their utility in addressing persistent threats to cooperation and coordination. However, little experimental work has assessed whether or not socioecological pressures can generate systematic variation in the content and structure of specific beliefs. Here, we assess the causal pathway between social ecology and beliefs by experimentally examining whether or not the content of freely elicited beliefs about God's concerns change because of breaches of trust. We find that riskily investing in others and receiving no return or delaying the outcome in an economic Trust Game experiment increases the chances of claiming that greed angers God. These results suggest that religious cognition flexibly attends to social ecology and can therefore plausibly evolve in ways that address breaches in cooperative pursuits.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2019

The emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evo... more 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 behav-ioural 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 out-group 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.

Does moral culture contribute to the evolution of cooperation? Here, we examine individuals' and ... more Does moral culture contribute to the evolution of cooperation? Here, we examine individuals' and communities' models of what it means to be good and bad and how they correspond to corollary behavior across a variety of socioecological contexts. Our sample includes over 600 people from eight different field sites that include for-agers, horticulturalists, herders, and the fully market-reliant. We first examine the universals and particulars of explicit moral models. We then use these moral models to assess their role in the outcome of an economic experiment designed to detect systematic, dishonest rule-breaking favoritism. We show that individuals are slightly more inclined to play by the rules when their moral models include the task-relevant virtues of " honesty " and " dishonesty. " We also find that religious beliefs are better predictors of honest play than these virtues. The predictive power of these values' and beliefs' local prevalence, however, remains inconclusive. In summary, we find that religious beliefs and moral models may help promote honest behavior that may widen the breadth of human cooperation.

Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an imp... more Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both certain forms of rituals and commitment to particular types of gods. Using an experimental economic game, our team specifically tested whether or not individually held mental models of moralistic, punishing, and knowledgeable gods curb biases in favor of the self and the local community, and increase impartiality toward geographically distant anonymous co-religionists. Our sample includes 591 participants from eight diverse societies – iTaukei (indigenous) Fijians who practice both Christianity and ancestor worship, the animist Hadza of Tanzania, Hindu Indo-Fijians, Hindu Mauritians, shamanist-Buddhist Tyvans of southern Siberia, traditional Inland and Christian Coastal Vanuatuans from Tanna, and Christian Brazilians from Pesqueiro. In this article, we present cross-cultural evidence that addresses this question and discuss the implications and limitations of our project. This volume also offers detailed, site-specific reports to provide further contextualization at the local level.

Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dram... more Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. 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 mechanisms. 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 strangers. 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.

Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is posit... more Evolutionary theories of religion frequently assume that the presence of moralizing gods is positively associated with social complexity. An influential source of evidence for this assumption is the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), which uses the moralizing high gods variable to measure the outcome of interest (the presence of moralizing gods). In this paper, we critically assess the assumption that moralizing gods are associated with complex societies. We start by discussing the high god variable's coding criteria, which is largely defined by a theoretically irrelevant criterion: whether or not a god is a creator deity, regardless of its power or omniscience. We then show why, based on its coding criteria, the SCCS underestimates the presence of moralizing gods by systematically producing false negatives-coding moralizing gods as present because moralizing high gods are absent. We use datasets that include both moralizing gods and moralizing high gods to show that these false negatives are more frequent among lower levels of social complexity, strongly favoring a spurious positive association between social complexity and the presence of moralizing gods. We then show that this bias is likely strengthened by the ethnographic data and historical context from which the SCCS data were generated. We therefore question the widely assumed positive association between morally punitive gods and social complexity, and conclude that ethnographic evidence supports the prevalence of moralizing gods among small-scale societies.

Since the earliest days of the social sciences, the relationship between religion and cooperation... more Since the earliest days of the social sciences, the relationship between religion and cooperation has been a central topic. In this chapter, we critically review popular cultural evolutionary perspectives on religion and cooperation and consider how they frame the relationships between religious beliefs, behaviors, and the moral rules that motivate cooperation. We then offer an account of how religious systems can contribute to the stability of social life more generally, with cooperative dilemmas occupying a subset of a broader range of socioecological challenges that supernatural appeals might help resolve. We also provide a critical overview of methods used throughout much of the contemporary work on religion and cooperation. In doing so, we provide useful ways forward for testing how appeals to gods, spirits, and other supernatural forces can, in at least some cases, address locally important challenges to cooperation.

The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon... more The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society's social ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game theoretical dilemmas and argue that contemporary approaches that emphasize cognition and/or social learning at the expense of social ecology are inadequate in accounting for cross-cultural variation in religious expression. Using ethnographic examples, we show that religions alleviate the costs of such dilemmas in a variety of ways by: 1) fostering beliefs that motivate and sustain beneficial practices; 2) incentivizing cooperative ventures; 3) encouraging ritual performances that minimize costly conflicts and bolster territorial conventions; 4) providing institutional forums to coordinate resource distributions; and 5) maintaining important resource and species diversity.

While appeals to gods and spirits are ubiquitous throughout human societies past and present, dei... more While appeals to gods and spirits are ubiquitous throughout human societies past and present, deities' postulated concerns vary across populations. How does the content of beliefs about and appeals to gods vary across groups, and what accounts for this variation? With particular emphasis on locally important deities, we develop a novel cultural evolutionary account that includes a set of predictive criteria for what deities will be associated with in various socioecological contexts. We then apply these criteria in an analysis of individual-level ethnographic free-list data on what pleases and angers locally relevant deities from eight diverse societies. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative approaches to cross-cultural variation in god beliefs and appeals fare against our findings and close by considering some key implications of our methods and findings for the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion.

There are compelling reasons to expect that representing any active, powerful god or spirit may c... more There are compelling reasons to expect that representing any active, powerful god or spirit may contribute to cooperation. One possible mechanism underlying this effect is a system that infers that spiritual agents are morally concerned. If individuals cognitive represent deities as agents, and if agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern-a "moralization bias"-to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,229 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than not to indicate that supernatural deities are concerned with punishing immoral behavior in the form of theft, murder, and deceit, an effect that is stable even after holding constant the influence of explicitly moralistic deities. We also find that when deities are not associated with morality, communities socially sanction commitment to them. We posit that the moralization bias of gods' minds is part of a widespread but variable religious phenotype, and a candidate mechanism that contributes to the well-recognized association between religion and social harmony.

Cambridge History of Atheism

How prevalent is religious doubt among the traditional, small-scale populations typically studied... more How prevalent is religious doubt among the traditional, small-scale populations typically studied by anthropologists? Do traditional peoples resist religious mores? If so, how? Our chapter aims to answer these questions. We first consider the claim that some small-scale populations lack religion, or certain forms of religion, by examining several ethnographic case studies from around the world. We then discuss cases where populations incorporate subversion into religious traditions. We conclude by looking forward and recommending directions for future research on nonbelief and doubt among traditional populations.

The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the da... more The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences. Researchers have expended considerable effort addressing questions such as how widespread this relationship is and what aspects of religion contribute to "moral" behaviour. This Element probes these questions and how the social sciences have addressed them by detailing how theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. It shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. By critically examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, it argues that-given the role religious beliefs and practices play on our social lives-the relationship between religion and morality is, despite considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.

The Minds of Gods: New Horizons in the Naturalistic Study of Religion, 2023

Why are humans obsessed with divine minds? What do gods know and what do they care about? What ha... more Why are humans obsessed with divine minds? What do gods know and what do they care about? What happens to us and our relationships when gods are involved? Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary, cultural, and applied anthropology, social psychology, religious studies, philosophy, technology, cognitive and political sciences, The Minds of Gods probes these questions from a multitude of naturalistic perspectives. Each chapter offers brief intellectual histories of their topics, summarizes current cutting-edge questions in the field, and points to areas in need of attention from future researchers. Through an innovative theoretical framework that combines evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion, this book brings together otherwise disparate literatures to focus on a topic that has comprised a lasting, central obsession of our species.

Religion Evolving argues that religions need to be understood as adaptive systems. Drawing from a... more Religion Evolving argues that religions need to be understood as adaptive
systems. Drawing from a wealth of ethnographic and experimental evidence, the authors situate religious traditions within their local socioecological contexts, showing how these systems adaptively respond to economic, environmental, and health challenges. Based in the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, Religion Evolving offers a holistic approach that attends to the complex, interacting features of religious systems.