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.

Centre for Human Evolution Cognition and Culture University of British Columbia 1871 West Mall Vancouver British Columbia V6T 1Z2 Canada

Culture and Development Laboratory Department of Psychology The University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station A8000 Austin Texas 78712 0187 USA

Department of Anthropology University of Connecticut 354 Mansfield Road Unit 1176 Storrs Connecticut 06029 USA

Department of Economics University of British Columbia 2136 West Mall Vancouver British Columbia V6T 1Z4 Canada

Department of Human Evolutionary Biology Harvard University 11 Divinity Ave Cambridge Massachusetts 02138 USA

Department of Psychology University of Auckland Human Sciences Building 10 Symonds Street Auckland 1010 New Zealand

Department of Psychology University of British Columbia 2136 West Mall Vancouver British Columbia V6T 1Z4 Canada

Department of Psychology University of Pennsylvania Solomon Laboratories 3720 Walnut Street Philadelphia Pennsylvania 19104 6241 USA

Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology University of Oxford 64 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6PN UK

Interacting Minds Centre Aarhus University Jens Chr Skous Vej 4 building 1483 DK 8000 Aarhus Denmark

LEVYNA Masaryk University Brno 60200 Czech Republic

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Kahlaische Strasse 10 D 07745 Jena Germany

Wadham College University of Oxford Parks Road Oxford OX1 3PN UK

Komentář v

Nature. 2016 Feb 18;530(7590):285-7. doi: 10.1038/nature16879. PubMed

Komentář v

Nature. 2016 Apr 14;532(7598):177. doi: 10.1038/532177e. PubMed

Citace poskytuje Crossref.org

Witchcraft, Envy, and Norm Enforcement in Mauritius

Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures

Advertising cooperative phenotype through costly signals facilitates collective action

The Effects of Synchrony on Group Moral Hypocrisy

Replicating and extending the effects of auditory religious cues on dishonest behavior

Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies

The Boundaries of Trust: Cross-Religious and Cross-Ethnic Field Experiments in Mauritius

Cross-cultural dataset for the evolution of religion and morality project