Content uploaded by Benjamin Grant Purzycki
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Benjamin Grant Purzycki on Jul 20, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrbb20
Religion, Brain & Behavior
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrbb20
Guiding the evolution of the evolutionary sciences
of religion: a discussion
Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Martin Lang, Joseph Henrich & Ara Norenzayan
To cite this article: Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Martin Lang, Joseph Henrich & Ara Norenzayan
(2022) Guiding the evolution of the evolutionary sciences of religion: a discussion, Religion, Brain
& Behavior, 12:1-2, 226-232, DOI: 10.1080/2153599X.2021.2021552
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2021552
Published online: 06 Apr 2022.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 89
View related articles
View Crossmark data
References
Bromham, L., Skeels, A., Schneemann, H., Dinnage, R., & Hua, X. (2021). There is little evidence that spicy food in
hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk. Nature Human Behaviour,5, 878–891. https://doi.org/10.
1038/s41562-020-01039-8
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976). Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (Abriged by Eva Gillies). Clarendon
Press.
RESPONSE
Guiding the evolution of the evolutionary sciences of religion: a
discussion
Benjamin Grant Purzycki
a
, Martin Lang
b
, Joseph Henrich
c
, and Ara Norenzayan
d
a
Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark;
b
LEVYNA Laboratory for the
Experimental Research of Religion, Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia;
c
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA;
d
Department of
Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
We warmly thank the commentators on our article for their candid, constructive, and critical
remarks. Indeed, rather than merely replies to our introductory article, the commentaries are an
important part of an ongoing conversation about what we can know about ourselves and how to
go about learning it. We organize our replies into the following issues: conceptual, methodological,
and sociological.
Conceptual
One of the central concepts of our study was “moralistic supernatural punishment.”We defined it
operationally as a deity that cares more and knows more about immoral behavior than other locally
important deities and that punishes immoral behavior. “Morality”referred to pro- or anti-social
norms with a direct benefit or cost toward others (e.g., theft, murder, generosity, sharing) (Bendixen
et al., 2021a; Purzycki, Pisor, et al., 2018). In our view, this construct is more targeted and more
theory-relevant than the “high god”construct that many studies have relied on for so long (Botero
et al., 2014; Johnson, 2005; Murdock & White, 1969; Peoples & Marlowe, 2012; Snarey, 1996; Swan-
son, 1960; cf. Nichols et al., 2021). We actively resisted using the latter construct because, as Jackson
observes, it is too restricted; high gods are creator deities. This is neither a theoretically useful nor
pragmatically feasible limitation (see Purzycki, Henrich, et al. 2018; Purzycki & Watts, 2018). As far
as we know, general moralistic supernatural punishment is far more widespread in the ethno-
graphic world than morally punitive high gods are (Beheim et al., 2021; Bendixen et al., 2021b;
Boehm, 2008; Swanson, 1960; Watts et al., 2015).
We were quite candid throughout our shared works about how recent the direct inquiry of what
it meant to have a “moralistic god”(of any type) was; to the best of our knowledge, the first case of
directly asking people if their spirits knew and cared about morality was Purzycki’s work in Siberia
(Purzycki, 2011,2013), but the inquiry has grown to include this (see Purzycki et al., 2022) and
other projects (e.g., Singh et al., 2021; White et al., 2021; Willard et al., 2020). As such, we did
not seek to explain high gods’ubiquity or role in human cooperation. And, pace Richert, it was acci-
dental that most–not all–of the moralistic gods in our sample were the Christian god. Rather, we
CONTACT Benjamin Grant Purzycki bgpurzycki@gmail.com
226 B. G. PURZYCKI ET AL.
sought to examine moralistic supernatural punishment’s role in the expansion of potential coopera-
tive networks. There is much about this and related constructs that we still do not know and future
studies would do well to look before uncritically leaping to foregone conclusions. The points are
part of the larger emphasis that threads through our project on the importance of theory in guiding
research (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2019).
Methodological
Fischer points out that cross-cultural psychology has wrestled with many points that we made and
raises a few specific issues with our methods. We appreciated the alternative resources for future
researchers to study. However, at this point, it is a truism that if any researcher discussed things
with more diverse individuals and consulted previous attempts, he or she might have missed some-
thing. Alas, we are finite beings. We workshopped the design of the Wave 1 project with our inter-
disciplinary team and revised and expanded the project for Wave 2. Recall that the project was both
ethnographic and experimental, and anthropological as much as (if not more than) it was psycho-
logical, behavioral and cognitive—two of authors of this piece are trained anthropologists and eth-
nographers. It wasn’t clear to us what we would have done differently had we consulted the
materials provided by Fischer.
We were surprised by Fischer’s and Richert’s concerns about our treatment of local cultural con-
texts, since we consider attentiveness to local contexts as one of the strengths of our methodology,
goals, and infrastructure. The greater project included considerable space for site-specific contextua-
lizations, caveats, contradictory results, and other observations relevant to data interpretation in a
locally meaningful way. Our first special issue included seven site-specific papers (Apicella, 2018;
Atkinson, 2018; Cohen et al., 2018; McNamara & Henrich, 2018; Purzycki & Kulundary, 2018; Will-
ard, 2018; Xygalatas et al., 2018) and the present special issue offers seven more (Bolyanatz; Kundtová
Klocová, et al.; Placek and Lightner; Soler et al.; Stagnaro et al.; Vardy & Atkinson; Weigel). Each offers
an abundance of qualifications and caveats for the project and future research. This would be exactly
the place to go for the questions Fischer and Richert raise (indeed, two are devoted to field sites in
Brazilian contexts, a place to which Fischer appeals). The point we and the commentators raised stands
however; how each site’s uniqueness contributes to the greater conversation about religion’scontri-
bution to cooperation remains an important area awaiting future work (see Bendixen et al., 2021a).
There are countless ways to further attend to locally specific aspects of religiosity and, as we
noted, an even bigger task is to account for that variation. One of our main goals was to test a dis-
crete set of hypotheses and examine its utility and applicability cross-culturally and assess how local
context within the confines of a specific protocol and ethnographic insight can inform results. As
Luhrmann notes, juggling methodological consistency across sites and catering to site-specific con-
tingencies is no trivial task. With the clarity of hindsight, we can see that there were ways in which
we could have done a little more, but we are also confident that it could have been much worse had
we not anticipated many other issues early in the design stage.
Take, for example, Fischer’s speculation about the problems associated with participants and can-
didate participants swapping information about details of the experiments. This is a good reminder of
a standard concern (Sosis, 2005) that has been addressed systematically in several similar projects
(e.g., Ensminger & Henrich, 2014; Hruschka et al., 2014). Following standard practice, we corralled
participants in ways that they could not participate if given the opportunity to inform other candi-
dates about the nature of the games. Uninvited participants were turned away, players were not
allowed to interact with individuals who hadn’tplayed yet, and so forth. This is necessary to prevent
collusion.
Virtually all of the other interesting issues the commentators raise reflect a different focus or
dimension of a target construction (e.g., not finding consensus because of highly personal relation-
ships with spirits). Others raised issues that are detailed and operationalized elsewhere (e.g., “what
is a moralistic god vs a local god?”; just how “omniscient”are the gods? what are the “locally
RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 227
relevant group distinctions”?); our methods protocols are explicitly detailed in a host of venues (e.g.,
Lang et al., 2019; Purzycki et al., 2016a,2016b, 2018). Projects that have specific questions to ask
have to operationally define such constructs. Our protocols define the relevant groups in order to
comparably test the same hypotheses. The protocols operationally define things like “omniscience”
or “moral interest.”These will vary both emically and etically, and as they are high-inference vari-
ables, they are multi-dimensional. At the design stage, then, we therefore had to sacrifice addressing
many important dimensions of these constructs that the commentators raised. This is inevitable in
social science. In order to modestly curb some of these issues at the analytical stage, however, we
carried out many of the methodological recommendations van de Vijver and Leung (2000, hence-
forth, V&L) suggest, some of which Fischer refers to, such as: the use of multilevel modeling, testing
alternative explanations of our findings, looking for convergent evidence using multiple methods,
etc., and ongoing efforts using the data should embrace these forms of robustness checking and
attend to the manifold processes that contributed to the generation of data (see Deffner et al.,
2021), including the clustering factors (sociodemographic or otherwise) to which Sterelny points.
However, we also note that our study does not easily conform to V&L’s taxonomy of cross-cultural
studies (See Tables 1 & 2 on p. 40–41). Contrary to Fischer, this was not a “generalizability study”
which is designed to test whether a certain psychological construct or phenomenon is cross culturally
universal. Rather, our study tested a theory-driven hypothesis that predicted an association between
two variables that vary systematically across cultures. Unlike generalizability studies in V&L’s taxon-
omy, we had a whole array of contextual factors measured based on detailed ethnographic interviews,
but we weren’t comparing means across populations. Our study is closest to what V&L would call a
“theory-driven study.”There are nevertheless endless varieties of important sources of contextual
inputs to which we could have attended. Finally, we note some concerns with V&L’s taxonomy:
e.g., generalizabilty studies are a kind of theory-driven study in which a theory—implicitly or expli-
citly—predicts that some empirical pattern will reappear across diverse samples.
Sterelny raises the common worry of whether or not we can tell if participants are actually telling
us what they think or what they want us to think (on the problem of measuring belief, see Steadman
& Palmer, 2008). As he notes, people may have different incentives that drive their answers, and
these incentives need not be related just to self-presentation biases. To the extent that participants
tell us the kinds of things they want others to think as well, this might actually be an asset. Consen-
sus modeling (Oravecz et al., 2014; Romney et al., 1986) would allow us to at least get a metric of
how much an individual deviates from the commonly held cultural model, but wouldn’t necessarily
tap into the motivations or causes behind those deviations. Furthermore, at least in our study, if it
were the case that conveyed beliefs really weren’tprivate beliefs, the fact that they offered more to
distant individuals is also interesting. It would be a little odd, however, to behaviorally signal in this
way too, particularly when recipients were anonymous. This is one of many good reasons for care-
fully modeling posited causal effects early, thinking through how to address difficult—if not imposs-
ible—to adequately measure constructs like “belief”or “culture,”and sticking to a set of competing
causal models that incorporate unmeasured factors.
But future projects can also methodologically attend to these issues. While simply asking partici-
pants a survey question is fast and cheap, it may skew data in various directions in different popu-
lations. Finding a balance between feasibility and high validity of data on beliefs in supernatural
agents requires novel approaches such as using third-party reports when possible (Shaver et al.,
2021) or free-list data that ask people to list their thoughts about a particular deity without imposing
specific questions (Bendixen et al., 2021a). For instance, in the current special issue, Kundtová Klocová
et al. use free-list data to probe participants’sorcery beliefs and practices that are illegal in Mauritius.
Another possibility is to shift the focus more towards religious behavior. The field needs it; as an
organized kind of inquiry, the behavioral ecology of religion (see Reynolds & Tanner, 1995; Sosis &
Bulbulia, 2011) barely exists (for exceptions, see Power, 2017,2018; Shaver, 2015; Shaver et al., 2020;
Strassmann et al., 2012). We anticipate that this kind of inquiry, however, really requires site-
specific protocols rather than unified and streamlined methods that are applicable cross-culturally.
228 B. G. PURZYCKI ET AL.
Sociological
Luhrmann rightly notes that within-team trust is essential for success. Just as rapport with partici-
pants is essential for success in the field, good rapport with a team is critical. Such projects run the
risk of functioning more like private companies than participatory democratic organizations and
can therefore suck the enjoyment out of the effort. That said, a close second to trust is effective com-
munication. Generating a culture of clear expectations—and living up to them—is important for
both morale and organization. This is essential in crafting the type of cross-disciplinary teams
that Richert and to some extent Jackson envision—teams that would help us go further beyond
the Christian notion of a moralistic god.
Who should manage these projects and what are their future prospects? Luhrmann suggests hiring
a team of specialists in subdisciplines. They may have an easier transition out of the project if devel-
oping their specific skill (e.g., database management) and not be stigmatized for working on projects
that are strange to hiring committees in some fields. However, we worry that having two or three
people with very specific skills may preclude their fruitful collaboration and mutual understanding.
In our experience, despite the best will, facilitating discussions between ethnographers and data
scientists has many barriers that are challenging (but not impossible) to overcome. Another model
that we opted for was to have a one-for-all post-doc who gathered all the relevant expertise in one
person. While Purzycki contributed to design, Purzycki and Lang’s overlapping duties included.
.managing team communication and consensus
.organizing data audits
.cleaning and correcting data sets
.analyzing data
.managing public data storage and documentation
.leading paper-writing and editing of special issues
One advantage here is that organization and communication are centralized. However, aside
from the long hours and the rarity of candidates with enough experience in all domains, the obvious
disadvantage here is that the proverbial “jack of all trades, master of none”might be less employ-
able, as Sterelny suggests. Of course, a convoluted mess of causal factors big and small go into
today’s job market. And, perhaps with the exception of psychology, it remains bleak. So bleak, in
fact, that it is probably safe to adopt failure as the default and then take the time to explain successes.
If, however, we consider restructuring incentives from the ground-up, we can contribute to the
chances that new generations of researchers are motivated by quality, technical aptitude, and intel-
lectual versatility. As academic workloads increase, selecting a quieter, more pensive candidate
might take a little more patience and engagement than hiring a confident candidate with brand sen-
sibilities. As “selling”one’s“product”is increasingly the focus of job market preparation in a world
where sexy venues and headlines trump nuance, care, and diligence (see Smaldino & McElreath,
2016), it often appears that salesmanship, marketing, and grants are more important drivers of
the field than careful attention to the landscape of possible caveats that plague our knowledge.
Nevertheless, the many currents pushing social science in more credible and transparent directions
are promising (Hardwicke et al., 2020; Minocher et al., 2020).
It behooves those of us who are in positions of decision-making power to change the culture as
much as we can at all levels we can reach. We can start by redefining scientific deliverables,
rewarding diligence and training, and engaging in the kinds of interdisciplinarity that are essential
for such projects. Indeed, despite the general ill incentives, the proverbial “jacks of all trades”are a
necessary glue in interdisciplinary teams for they can provide general vision, build theories from
the bottom up (scaling up from cultural diversity to generality), and generate creative ideas across
disciplines. Only by building interdisciplinary groups comprising individuals across the
RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 229
humanities and the sciences can we start understanding complex cultural phenomena such as reli-
gious systems.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FL 2013].
ORCID
Benjamin Grant Purzycki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9595-7360
Martin Lang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2231-1059
References
Apicella, C. L. (2018). High levels of rule-bending in a minimally religious and largely egalitarian forager population.
Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1267034
Atkinson, Q. D. (2018). Religion and expanding the cooperative sphere in Kastom and Christian villages on Tanna,
Vanuatu. Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 149–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1267028
Beheim, B., Atkinson, Q. D., Bulbulia, J., Gervais, W., Gray, R. D., Henrich, J., Lang, M., Monroe, M. W.,
Muthukrishna, M., Norenzayan, A., Purzycki, B. G., Shariff, A., Slingerland, E., Spicer, R., & Willard, A. K.
(2021). Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods. Nature,595(7866), E29–
E34. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03655-4
Bendixen, T., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., Henrich, J., McNamara, R. A., Norenzayan, A., Willard, A.,
Xygalatas, D., & Purzycki, B. G. (2021a). Appealing to the minds of gods: A novel cultural evolutionary account
of religious appeals and an empirical assessment using ethnographic data from eight diverse societies. PsyArXiv.
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tjn3e.
Bendixen, T., Lightner, A., & Purzycki, B. G. (2021b). The cultural evolution of religion and cooperation. PsyArXiv.
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fhscv.
Boehm, C. (2008). A biocultural evolutionary exploration of supernatural sanctioning. In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, E.
Harris, R. Genet, & K. Wyman (Eds.), Evolution of religion: Studies, theories, and critiques (pp. 143–152).
Collins Foundation Press.
Botero, C. A., Gardner, B., Kirby, K. R., Bulbulia, J., Gavin, M. C., & Gray, R. D. (2014). The ecology of religious beliefs.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,111(47), 16784–16789. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1408701111
Cohen, E., Baimel, A., & Purzycki, B. G. (2018). Religiosity and resource allocation in Marajó, Brazil. Religion, Brain
& Behavior,8(2), 168–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1267029
Deffner, D., Rohrer, J. M., & McElreath, R. (2021). A causal framework for cross-cultural generalizability. PsyArXiv.
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fqukp.
Ensminger, J., & Henrich, J. (2014). Experimenting with social norms: Fairness and punishment in cross-cultural per-
spective. Russell Sage Foundation.
Hardwicke, T. E., Wallach, J. D., Kidwell, M. C., Bendixen, T., Crüwell, S., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2020). An empirical
assessment of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices in the social sciences (2014–2017). Royal
Society Open Science,7(2), 190806. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190806
Hruschka, D., Efferson, C., Jiang, T., Falletta-Cowden, A., Sigurdsson, S., McNamara, R., Sands, M., Munira, S.,
Slingerland, E., & Henrich, J. (2014). Impartial institutions, pathogen stress and the expanding social network.
Human Nature,25(4), 567–579. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-014-9217-0
Johnson, D. D. P. (2005). God’s punishment and public goods. Human Nature,16(4), 410–446. https://doi.org/10.
1007/s12110-005-1017-0
Lang, M., Purzycki, B. G., Apicella, C. L., Atkinson, Q. D., Bolyanatz, A., Cohen, E., Handley, C., Kundtová Klocová,
E., Lesorogol, C., Mathew, S., McNamara, R. A., Moya, C., Placek, C. D., Soler, M., Vardy, T., Weigel, J. L., Willard,
A. K., Xygalatas, D., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2019). Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochial-
ism across 15 societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,286(1898), 20190202. https://doi.org/
10.1098/rspb.2019.0202
230 B. G. PURZYCKI ET AL.
McNamara,R.A.,&Henrich,J.(2018). Jesus vs. the ancestors: How specific religious beliefs shape prosociality
on Yasawa Island, Fiji. Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 185–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.
1267030
Minocher, R., Atmaca, S., Bavero, C., McElreath, R., & Beheim, B. (2020). Reproducibility of social learning research
declines exponentially over 63 years of publication [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4nzc7.
Murdock, G. P., & White, D. R. (1969). Standard cross-cultural sample. Ethnology,8(4), 329–369. https://doi.org/10.
2307/3772907
Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour,3(3), 221–229. https://doi.
org/10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1
Nichols, R., Slingerland, E., Nielbo, K. L., Kirby, P., & Logan, C. (2021). Supernatural agents and prosociality in his-
torical China: Micro-modeling the cultural evolution of gods and morality in textual corpora. Religion, Brain &
Behavior,11(1), 46–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2020.1742778
Oravecz, Z., Vandekerckhove, J., & Batchelder, W. H. (2014). Bayesian cultural consensus theory. Field Methods,26
(3), 207–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X13520280
Peoples, H. C., & Marlowe, F. W. (2012). Subsistence and the evolution of religion. Human Nature,23(3), 253–269.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-012-9148-6
Power, E. (2017). Discerning devotion: Testing the signaling theory of religion. Evolution and Human Behavior,38
(1), 82–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.07.003
Power, E. (2018). Collective ritual and social support networks in rural South India. Proceedings of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences,285(1879), 20180023. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0023
Purzycki, B. G. (2011). Tyvan cher eezi and the socioecological constraints of supernatural agents’minds. Religion,
Brain & Behavior,1(1), 31–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2010.550723
Purzycki, B. G. (2013). The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency. Cognition,129(1), 163–179.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.06.010
Purzycki, B. G., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q. D., Cohen, E., McNamara, R. A., Willard, A. K., Xygalatas, D., Norenzayan,
A., & Henrich, J. (2016a). Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality. Nature,
530(7590), 327–330. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16980
Purzycki, B. G., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q. D., Cohen, E., McNamara, R. A., Willard, A. K., Xygalatas, D., Norenzayan,
A., & Henrich, J. (2016b). Cross-cultural dataset for the evolution of religion and morality project. Scientific Data,
3(1), 160099. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.99
Purzycki, B. G., Henrich, J., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q. D., Baimel, A., Cohen, E., McNamara, R. A., Willard, A. K.,
Xygalatas, D., & Norenzayan, A. (2018). The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and
experimental evidence from eight societies. Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 101–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/
2153599X.2016.1267027
Purzycki, B. G., & Kulundary, V. (2018). Buddhism, identity, and class: Fairness and favoritism in the Tyva Republic.
Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 205–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1267031
Purzycki, B. G., Pisor, A. C., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., Henrich, J., McElreath, R., McNamara, R. A.,
Norenzayan, A., Willard, A. K., & Xygalatas, D. (2018). The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior.
Evolution and Human Behavior,39(5), 490–501. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.04.004
Purzycki, B. G., & Watts, J. (2018). Reinvigorating the comparative, cooperative ethnographic sciences of religion.
Free Inquiry,38(3), 26–29.
Purzycki, B., Willard, A., Kundtová Klocová, E., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Bolyanatz, A., Cohen, E., Handley, C.,
Henrich, J., Lang, M., Lesorogol, C., Mathew, S., McNamara, R., Moya, C., Norenzayan, A., Placek, C., Soler,
M., Weigel, J., Xygalatas, D., …Ross, C. T. (2022). The moralization bias of gods’minds: A cross-cultural test.
Religion, Brain and Behavior.https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006291
Reynolds, V., & Tanner, R. (1995). The social ecology of religion (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Romney, A. K., Weller, S. C., & Batchelder, W. H. (1986). Culture as consensus: A theory of culture and informant
accuracy. American Anthropologist,88(2), 313–338. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1986.88.2.02a00020
Shaver, J. H. (2015). The evolution of stratification in Fijian ritual participation. Religion, Brain & Behavior,5(2),
101–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2014.893253
Shaver, J. H., Power, E. A., Purzycki, B. G., Watts, J., Sear, R., Shenk, M. K., Sosis, R., & Bulbulia, J. A. (2020). Church
attendance and alloparenting: An analysis of fertility, social support and child development among English
mothers. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,375(1805), 20190428. https://doi.
org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0428
Shaver, J. H., White, T. A. J., Vakaoti, P., & Lang, M. (2021). A comparison of self-report, systematic observation and
third-party judgments of church attendance in a rural Fijian village. PLoS ONE,16(10), e0257160. https://doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pone.0257160
Singh, M., Kaptchuk, T. J., & Henrich, J. (2021). Small gods, rituals, and cooperation: The Mentawai water spirit
Sikameinan. Evolution and Human Behavior,42(1), 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.008
Smaldino, P. E., & McElreath, R. (2016). The natural selection of bad science. Royal Society Open Science,3(9),
160384. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160384
RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 231
Snarey, J. (1996). The natural environment’s impact upon religious ethics: A cross-cultural study. Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion,35(2), 85–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387077
Sosis, R. (2005). Methods do matter: Variation in experimental methodologies and results. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences,28(6), 834–835. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X05420142
Sosis, R., & Bulbulia, J. (2011). The behavioral ecology of religion: The benefits and costs of one evolutionary
approach. Religion,41(3), 341–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.604514
Steadman, L. B., & Palmer, C. T. (2008). The supernatural and natural selection: Religion and evolutionary success.
Paradigm Publishers.
Strassmann, B. I., Kurapati, N. T., Hug, B. F., Burke, E. E., Gillespie, B. W., Karafet, T. M., & Hammer, M. F. (2012).
Religion as a means to assure paternity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,109(25), 9781–9785.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1110442109
Swanson, G. E. (1960). The birth of the gods: The origin of primitive beliefs. University of Michigan Press.
van de Vijver, F. J. R., & Leung, K. (2000). Methodological issues in psychological research on culture. Journal of
Cross-Cultural Psychology,31(1), 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022100031001004
Watts, J., Greenhill, S. J., Atkinson, Q. D., Currie, T. E., Bulbulia, J., & Gray, R. D. (2015). Broad supernatural punish-
ment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia. Proceedings of the
Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,282(1804), 20142556. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2556
White, C. J. M., Willard, A. K., Baimel, A., & Norenzayan, A. (2021). Cognitive pathways to belief in karma and belief
in god. Cognitive Science,45(1), e12935. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12935
Willard, A. K. (2018). Religion and prosocial behavior among the Indo-Fijians. Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 227–
242. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1267032
Willard, A. K., Baimel, A., Turpin, H., Jong, J., & Whitehouse, H. (2020). Rewarding the good and punishing the bad:
The role of karma and afterlife beliefs in shaping moral norms. Evolution and Human Behavior,41(5), 385–396.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.001
Xygalatas, D., Kotherová, S., Maňo, P., Kundt, R., Cigán, J., Klocová, E. K., & Lang, M. (2018). Big gods in small
places: The random allocation game in Mauritius. Religion, Brain & Behavior,8(2), 243–261. https://doi.org/10.
1080/2153599X.2016.1267033
232 B. G. PURZYCKI ET AL.