Coding, causality, and statistical craft: The emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved

The target article from Turchin et al. assesses the relationship between social complexity and moralistic supernatural punishment. In our evaluation of their project, we argue that each step of its workflow -- from data production and theory to modeling and reporting -- makes it impossible to test the hypothesis that its authors claim they are testing. We focus our discussion on three important classes of issues: problems of data, analysis, and causal inference.

Belief, Belonging, or Both? The Interaction Between Supernatural Belief and Identity Fusion, and their Influence on Cooperative Behaviour

<p>Research within the psychology of religion has illustrated the importance of both religious belief and religious belonging for facilitating cooperative behaviour. Specifically, the supernatural punishment hypothesis (Johnson, 2016; Johnson & Krüger, 2004) and identity fusion (Swann et al., 2009; Whitehouse, 2018) discuss belief and belonging, respectively. This thesis examines the connection of these two areas, with a focus on the understudied religious concept of karma. In Study 1, 193 participants took part in an online questionnaire, with a five-condition between subjects design, that investigated the content of religious belief by using karma and god related religious priming stimuli (images and vignettes) to influence individual’s belief. None of the four experimental conditions were found to change responses on belief in supernatural agents or karma. Belief in god/karma was associated with endorsement of both a punitive and benevolent god/karma. However, when both endorsements were included in the model, only benevolent endorsement was significant. In Study 2, 402 participants took part in a three-condition mixed-methods design with six repeated trials of a voluntary contribution task, which investigated how karma and god related religious priming stimuli (vignettes) influenced cooperative behaviour. Mixed methods analysis revealed that those in the karma condition had higher cooperative tendencies than those in the neutral condition, but did not differ from the god condition. Belief in supernatural agents did not affect how individuals were affected by the god condition. However, those with higher belief in supernatural agents and higher identity fusion were the least cooperative within the karma condition. Contrary to what was predicted, increased belief in karma predicted un-cooperative behaviour in the karma condition. These and other important findings are discussed with focus on the New Zealand context and how the findings from this thesis contributes to the supernatural punishment and identity fusion literature, by highlighting implications, limitations, and areas of focus for future research.</p>

Belief, Belonging, or Both? The Interaction Between Supernatural Belief and Identity Fusion, and their Influence on Cooperative Behaviour

<p>Research within the psychology of religion has illustrated the importance of both religious belief and religious belonging for facilitating cooperative behaviour. Specifically, the supernatural punishment hypothesis (Johnson, 2016; Johnson & Krüger, 2004) and identity fusion (Swann et al., 2009; Whitehouse, 2018) discuss belief and belonging, respectively. This thesis examines the connection of these two areas, with a focus on the understudied religious concept of karma. In Study 1, 193 participants took part in an online questionnaire, with a five-condition between subjects design, that investigated the content of religious belief by using karma and god related religious priming stimuli (images and vignettes) to influence individual’s belief. None of the four experimental conditions were found to change responses on belief in supernatural agents or karma. Belief in god/karma was associated with endorsement of both a punitive and benevolent god/karma. However, when both endorsements were included in the model, only benevolent endorsement was significant. In Study 2, 402 participants took part in a three-condition mixed-methods design with six repeated trials of a voluntary contribution task, which investigated how karma and god related religious priming stimuli (vignettes) influenced cooperative behaviour. Mixed methods analysis revealed that those in the karma condition had higher cooperative tendencies than those in the neutral condition, but did not differ from the god condition. Belief in supernatural agents did not affect how individuals were affected by the god condition. However, those with higher belief in supernatural agents and higher identity fusion were the least cooperative within the karma condition. Contrary to what was predicted, increased belief in karma predicted un-cooperative behaviour in the karma condition. These and other important findings are discussed with focus on the New Zealand context and how the findings from this thesis contributes to the supernatural punishment and identity fusion literature, by highlighting implications, limitations, and areas of focus for future research.</p>

Game Theoretical Aspects of the Minds of Gods

From Pascal’s Wager and Guthrie’s theory of religion as anthropomorphism to supernatural punishment and the distribution of ritual centers, elements of game theory have been useful for framing various dilemmas that people face between each other and their deities. This chapter first provides a brief introduction to game theory and discusses how it has been used to address various questions in the context of religion and cooperation. It then concludes with a brief discussion of how future research might use it to investigate particular religious traditions.

Supernatural punishment beliefs as manipulated explanations of misfortune

Why do humans develop beliefs apparently well-suited to promote prosociality, such as beliefs in moralistic supernatural punishment? Leading hypotheses regard such beliefs to be group-level cultural adaptations, shaped by intergroup competition to facilitate cooperation. We present a complementary model in which cognitive mechanisms and strategic interactions produce and stabilize such beliefs. People incentivize others’ cooperation through behaviors such as punishment, moralistic narratives, and, we suggest, claims of supernatural punishment. These overcome mechanisms of epistemic vigilance by posing as explanations of misfortune and containing threatening information, as well as potentially appealing to justice intuitions and aligning with signaling incentives. Explaining religious belief requires considering both people’s motivations to invest in the production of supernatural narratives and the reasons others adopt them.

Big Gods did not drive the rise of big societies throughout world history

The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles. The ‘Big Gods Hypothesis’ offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of Big Gods and big societies, the relationship between the two is disputed, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To address these issues, we analyze data in the Seshat Global History Databank that coded 309 past societies for variables capturing beliefs in moralizing supernatural punisment and social complexity. The longitudinal (time-resolved) nature of Seshat data enables us to test evolutionary hypotheses about processes generating social change and distinguish between competing causal scenarios. We find that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment only appear after the largest increases in social complexity and that a formal analysis designed to test for causal relationships failed to detect a statistically significant effect of moralizing supernatural punishment on social complexity.

Commitment and impersonation: A reputation-based theory of principled behavior

Principled behavior seems to defy evolutionary logic. Principled people consistently abide by their principles, ignore tradeoffs or compromises, and pursue the principles for transcendental reasons, such as that they are “right”, decreed by God, or part of an eternal debt to the emperor. Here, we explain principled behavior as a combination of what we call “committed agents” and “impersonators”. Committed agents are individuals whose extreme psychology compels them to never deviate from a maxim and who are especially trustworthy for it. Imitators non-consciously masquerade as committed agents to garner trust. Given that observers can only determine whether a person is genuinely committed on the basis of their behavior, impersonators must appear to never deviate from the maxim, never think about deviating, pursue the maxim for the reason motivating committed agents, and justify ambiguous or compromising decision as conforming to the principle. We use this account to explain key features of principled behavior as well as seemingly unrelated phenomena, including cognitive dissonance, foot-in-the-door effects, moral licensing, sacred values, the expanding moral circle, and beliefs in supernatural punishment. Principled behavior consists of the behavior of rare extreme individuals and strategic attempts by others to pass as them.

Good Gods Almighty

If “Big Gods” evolved in part because of their ability to morally regulate groups of people who cannot count on kin or reciprocal altruism to get along (Norenzayan, 2013), then powerful gods would tend to be good gods. If the mechanism for this cooperation is some kind of fear of supernatural punishment (Johnson & Bering, 2006), then we may expect that mighty gods tend to be punishing gods. The present study is a statistical analysis of superhuman being concepts from 20 countries on five continents to explore whether the goodness of a god is related to its mightiness. Gods that looked more like the God of classical theism and gods that were low in anthropomorphism were more likely to be regarded as morally good and to be the target of religious practices. Mighty gods were not, however, especially likely to punish or to be a “high god.”