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.

Aarhus University Aarhus Denmark

Arizona State University Phoenix Arizona USA

Brunel University London UK

College of DuPage Glen Ellyn Illinois USA

Department of Anthropology Ball State University Muncie Indiana USA

Department of Anthropology University of California Davis Davis California USA

Department of Anthropology University of Connecticut Storrs Connecticut USA

Department of Human Evolutionary Biology Harvard University Cambridge Massachusetts USA

Department of International Development London School of Economics London UK

Department of Psychological Sciences University of Connecticut Storrs Connecticut USA

Department of Psychology University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand

Department of Psychology University of British Columbia Vancouver British Columbia Canada

Department of Psychology University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia Pennsylvania

Haas School of Business University of California Berkeley Berkeley California USA

LEVYNA Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena Germany

Ob Gyn and Women's Health Institute Cleveland Clinic Cleveland Ohio USA

School of Psychology Victoria University of Wellington Wellington New Zealand

Wadham College University of Oxford Oxford UK

Washington University in St Louis St Louis Missouri USA

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