Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14210%2F19%3A00109241" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14210/19:00109241 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0202" target="_blank" >https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0202</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0202" target="_blank" >10.1098/rspb.2019.0202</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies
Original language description
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.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60304 - Religious studies
Result continuities
Project
<a href="/en/project/EE2.3.20.0048" target="_blank" >EE2.3.20.0048: Laboratory for Experimental Research of Religion</a><br>
Continuities
P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)
Others
Publication year
2019
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences
ISSN
0962-8452
e-ISSN
1471-2954
Volume of the periodical
286
Issue of the periodical within the volume
1898
Country of publishing house
GB - UNITED KINGDOM
Number of pages
10
Pages from-to
1-10
UT code for WoS article
000465433600014
EID of the result in the Scopus database
2-s2.0-85062638222