Morality and the Gods

Abstract

The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences. Researchers have expended considerable effort addressing questions such as how widespread this relationship is and what aspects of religion contribute to "moral" behaviour. This Element probes these questions and how the social sciences have addressed them by detailing how theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. It shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. By critically examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, it argues that-given the role religious beliefs and practices play on our social lives-the relationship between religion and morality is, despite considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.

Full text

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Morality and the Gods
Elements in the Psychology of Religion
DOI: 10.xxxx/xxxxxxxx (do not change)
First published online: MMM dd YYYY (do not change)
Benjamin Grant Purzycki
Aarhus University
Abstract: The relationship between religion and morality has been a
steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences.
Researchers have expended considerable effort addressing questions
such as how widespread this relationship is and what aspects of religion
contribute to “moral” behaviour. This Element probes these questions
and how the social sciences have addressed them by detailing how
theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. It
shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has
been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. By critically
examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer
questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, it
argues that–given the role religious beliefs and practices play on our
social lives–the relationship between religion and morality is, despite
considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.
Keywords: gods, morality, cultural evolution of religion, cognitive
science of religion, indigenous religions, ethnography
JEL classifications: A12, B34, C56, D78, E90
©Benjamin Grant Purzycki, 2025
ISBNs: xxxxxxxxxxxxx(PB) xxxxxxxxxxxxx(OC)
ISSNs: xxxx-xxxx (online) xxxx-xxxx (print)

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Contents
1 Preprint Note 1
2 Introduction 2
3 History and Ethnography 3
4
Societal Typologies and the Quantification
of Culture
14
5 Cognition and Religion 30
6 The Evolution of Religious Behaviour 43
7 The Evolution of Religious Beliefs 54
8 Rethinking Morality and the Gods 68
References 76

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Psychology of Religion 1
1 Preprint Note
PLEASE NOTE: This is a public preprint of a forthcoming book. In ad-
dition to all that implies, please note that the final version will not be the
same as this version due to space limitations (e.g. some citations will be
thinned and some discussion will be excised). Please feel free to contact me at
bgpurzycki[at]cas.au.dk if you have any questions.
I compiled and posted this on January 9, 2025, right before going to see the new
Nosferatu film. Any connection this book has with the film is purely coincidental.
Purzycki, B. G. (forthcoming). Morality and the Gods. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

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2Elements in the Psychology of Religion
2 Introduction
The relationship between morality
1
and the gods
2
has been a steadfast topic
of discussion for at least as long as the written word. In fact, the earliest of
preserved written records explicitly mention a relationship between prescribed
moral rules and what the gods want. Written around the 21st century BCE,
the oldest known legal code–the Sumerian Ur-Nammu code–claims inspiration
from the gods. Inscribed four hundred years later, the Code of Hammurabi
begins with references to the gods Anu and Bel. In addition to reporting that
Anu and Bel assigned the task of overseeing humanity to another god, Marduk,
Hammurabi suggests that they also commanded him to promote his laws and to
“destroy the wicked and the evil.” In claiming these gods encouraged him to
“prevent the strong from oppressing the weak” (Harper, 1904, 3), Hammurabi
links gods, the moral order, and equality together in ways researchers have
theorised since the dawn of the social sciences.
These documents explicitly connect the gods to moral codes, but many
questions arise when we treat the nature of this relationship as a social scientific
question. For instance, how common is the connection between the gods and
morality? Is it present across the world’s religions or is it particular to a narrow
subset of religious traditions? How is the connection expressed? Is it found
in both beliefs and behaviour? Does this relationship exist in different forms?
Does religion actually contribute to moral behaviour or is it just a matter of how
people talk? What accounts for this relationship? How should we even conceive
religion and morality? Why associate gods with how we treat each other? Why
not just appeal to basic decency or social harmony? This Element addresses
these questions and how the social sciences and other fields have gone about
addressing them.
From a range of perspectives, we’ll take a critical eye toward this area,
point to where problems need more attention, and hint at ways to go about
resolving them. As this Element reviews the modern history of how social
science has addressed these questions, it is primarily organized chronologically.
This organisation has the benefit of conveying just how central the topic has
1
This Element does not defend a particular definition of “morality.” For the sake of exposition
and further comparison, it instead compares authors’ uses on their own terms. Throughout the
text, I’ll include explicit definitions and examples when they are available. See Section 5.2.1 for a
concise survey of some important views.
2
This text treats “gods” and “spirits” synonymously as concepts of anthropomorphic, super-
empirical spiritual agents. While spiritual forces like karma,mana, and luck might also play an
important role on morality similar to how gods might, it remains unclear if such forces affect human
relationships any differently than gods (see Sørensen & Purzycki, 2023; C. J. White, Kelly, Shariff,
& Norenzayan, 2019; C. J. White, Norenzayan, & Schaller, 2019). We’ll focus here on the gods.

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been throughout the generations, but it also gives us a sense of how theory and
method have developed over the past few centuries. The volume also cross-cuts
traditional disciplinary boundaries, and finds synergies between fields that span
from anthropology and evolutionary biology to sociology and psychology. In
doing so, it emphasizes various methods and data types researchers use to
address these core questions.3
This Element is outlined as follows. Section 3 details the deeper history
of thought regarding the relationship between religion and morality. In doing
so, it highlights important representative shifts in thinking and method and
examines some of the forces that propelled the emergence of anthropological
and sociological inquiry. These fields increased our knowledge of the kinds of
cultural diversity exhibited by people around the world and created the demand
for global, cross-cultural models and methods. Section 4 critically assesses the
development of cross-cultural typologies and datasets, two pivotal resources
that have had a lasting impact on how we see the relationship between morality,
society, and the gods. In Section 5, we’ll then examine the contemporary
cognitive and psychological sciences, fields of which have emphasized the
importance of the biological foundations of morality and religious beliefs.
Drawing from this, we’ll see how the scientific study of religious behaviours
(Section 6) and beliefs (Section 7) embraced contemporary evolutionary theory.
The concluding section offers some summary points and a survey of the horizon
ahead.
3 History and Ethnography4
We might never know just how long human beings have contemplated how
the divine relates to how they should interact with each other (for a survey,
see Rossano, 2010). As we saw, the oldest known writing clearly details this
relationship, but it most likely long predates writing. Interestingly, the earliest
accounts of the New World’s indigenous populations include details of their
religious traditions and moral sensibilities. These observations provide us with
a glimpse of how the West’s ongoing fascination with morality and the gods
evolved. As we’ll see, the more European observers interacted with non-Western
populations, the greater the demand to account for human variation became.
Central to this increased demand was the topic of morality and the gods.
3
All data and code used herein can be accessed here:
https://github.com/bgpurzycki/
MoralityandtheGods.
4
This section draws from Purzycki and McKay (2023) and Lightner, Bendixen, and Purzycki
(2023).

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3.1 Contact
The earliest written European observations of indigenous, “traditional”,
or “non-state” populations
5
include some striking claims about religion. For
example, in his diary, Christopher Columbus suggested that the native Taíno
(Arawak) “would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to [him] that they
had no religion” (Dunn & Kelley Jr., 1989, 69). A more nuanced view comes
from Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566). Working in the
New World throughout the 1500s, de las Casas agreed that American Indians
lacked the “true faith” of Christianity, but argued that they would have no trouble
learning it because they were so reasonable. In fact, de las Casas devoted much
of his life to demonstrating that American natives were remarkably virtuous and
their societies were diverse and socially complex in ways that matched or even
surpassed the ancient civilisations so often adored by the West:
Did Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, or even Aristotle leave us better or more
natural or more necessary exhortations to the virtuous life than these barbarians
delivered to their children? Does the Christian religion teach us more, save the
faith and what it teaches us of invisible and supernatural matters? Therefore,
no one may deny that these people are fully capable of governing themselves
and of living like men of good intelligence and more than others well ordered,
sensible, prudent, and rational (cited in Hanke, 1951, 80).
Here, de las Casas rhetorically asks whether Christianity really does contain
much of anything in the way of being a good person beyond what American
Indians already taught their children. He also notes that the virtues to which he
refers are those necessary for self-governance; American Indians already know
all that is required to have self-sustaining societies. Alas, not all missionaries
agreed and de las Casas remains a notable exception.
Nearly a century and a half later, two missionaries working among the
native Martiniquez islanders left some curious insights into their method. One
missionary suggested that “having lived without any knowledge of God, [the
native Caribbeans] die without hope of salvation. It would be better for us to
say that they have no religion at all, instead of describing as a cult of divinity
all their trifling nonsense, superstitions, or more exactly sacrileges with which
they honor all of the demons who seduce them” (Breton, 1929 [1635–1647], 5,
emphasis added). Another (Bouton, 1635) concurs, noting that the indigenous
“do not trouble themselves with knowing what becomes of [the souls of the
5
Outside of direct quotation, I’ll use “indigenous,” “traditional,” or “non-state” henceforth to
refer to the religious systems found in relatively smaller-scale societies of non-European descent.

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dead]; at least we have never been able to draw this information out of them”
(1). Conveying the level of methodological sophistication of the time, Bouton
notes that he and his fellow missionaries have had very little experience with
the people, suggesting that they could perhaps “learn more if we were to live
among them or they among us. At the present time they are greatly separated
from us by inaccessible hills, so that we see them rarely and only when they
come by sea to trade with the French” (ibid.).
Two hundred years later, one missionary who worked among Abipón Indians
of Paraguay held that “the American savages are slow, dull, and stupid in the
apprehension of things not present to their outward senses. Reasoning is a
process troublesome and almost unknown to them. It is, therefore, no wonder
that the contemplation of terrestrial or celestial objects should inspire them with
no idea of the creative Deity, nor indeed of any thing heavenly” (Dobrizhoffer,
1822, 58). Even after spending 18 years (1749-1767) among the Abipón, he
maintained that they are “accustomed from their earliest age to superstition,
slaughter, and rapine, and naturally dull and stupid as brutes.” Yet, in striking
contrast to de las Casas’ sentiments, these “fools, idiots, and madmen” (64)
are nevertheless capable of conversion “when the good sense of the teacher
compensates for the stupidity of his pupils” (62).
These days, we might be considerably less credulous about past generations’
unsavoury conclusions about indigenous peoples and their religions. If we are
genuinely interested in what the religions of traditional societies are/were like
and whether they were associated with morality, these authors’ motivations
and worrisome methods (or lack thereof) should give us pause. Things have
changed. The more the West interacted with the rest of the world, the more it had
to come to terms with the dazzling variation that people exhibited. Eventually,
the field of anthropology offered an antidote to the bigotry of generations past,
thus paving the way for a more enlightened view and approach to understanding
cultural variation. As we’ll see, however, these contributions did not come
overnight. In fact, we’re still in the midst of the transition.
3.2 The Dawn of Professional Cross-Cultural
Comparison
Professional anthropology developed as a means to come to grips with the
West’s increasing awareness of humans’ remarkable diversity (Harris, 1968).
While fieldwork and direct inquiry took some time to become standard, the
quest to understand the underlying commonalities of humanity amidst our
overwhelming variation was central to the field’s origins. In fact, anthropology’s

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genesis was specifically devoted to coming to terms with religious diversity.
In the earliest days of the discipline, researchers were motivated by a
few competing cultural evolutionary theories. One was progressivism. A
prototypical model of progressivism comes from early anthropologist Lewis
Henry Morgan (1877), who argued that “mankind commenced their career at the
bottom of the scale and worked their way up...through the slow accumulations of
experimental knowledge” (3). The stages of this scale were three-fold, including
savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, each of which have “lower,” “middle,”
and “upper” designations.
6
Across these progressive stages, subsistence–or the
way people procure food–“has been increased and perfected,” languages were
increasingly articulate, and there was an increased cultural emphasis on private
property (5-6).
7
In this view, cultural evolution was progressive; civilisation
was obviously inherently better than savagery. But this model of evolution was
also unilinear; to become civilised, a society must have passed through a state
of barbarism. Morgan’s view also offered a mechanism of change; humanity’s
constant tinkering and drive for improvement contributed to a society’s passage
from one state to another. Indigenous peoples in relatively smaller societies
evidently hadn’t tinkered enough.
It was in this progressivist milieu that came what is often hailed as the founding
document of anthropology, namely, E. B. Tylor’s two-volume Primitive Culture
(1871a; 1871b). Drawing from a wide range of cross-cultural observations–
albeit of the time’s quality–Tylor’s work disputed the then-held conviction
that indigenous societies lack religion. This bears repeating: Tylor spent
two volumes, among other things, arguing against the centuries-old idea that
“primitive peoples” had no religion.
Like Morgan, Tylor viewed the development of societies as progressive,
considering that “the savage state in some measure represents an early condition
of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed or
evolved, by processes still in regular operation as of old, the result showing
that, on the whole, progress has far prevailed over relapse” (32). Despite this
6
Morgan was not the first to deploy such terms. In fact, in his defence of American Indians,
Bartolomé de las Casas creates a four-fold typology of barbarism. American Indians, he writes, are
merely the kinds of barbarians who are non-numerate, non-literate, and lack Christianity rather than
those who are irrational or ferocious and violent (cited in Sanderlin, 1992, 123-127).
7
Incidentally, Morgan does not discuss religion that much, but does characterize “all primitive
religions [as] grotesque and to some extent unintelligible” (5). Given the context, we might
generously take “grotesque” to mean strange and/or haphazard. He also notes that some American
Indian traditions were “more or less vague and indefinite, and loaded with crude superstitions.
Element worship can be traced among the principal tribes, with a tendency to polytheism in the
advanced tribes” (115). This is one early take on the relationship between a society’s structure and
its religious world-view.

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tendency toward progression, so-called “higher culture” nevertheless contains
what Tylor called “survivals,” that is, “processes, customs, opinions, and so
forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society
different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain
as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer
has been evolved” (16). So, while societies might progressively evolve from
“lower” to “higher,” there remain vestiges of “lower” traditions in the “higher”
populations. One such survival is animism, “the doctrine of souls and other
spiritual beings in general” (23). In Tylor’s view, animism is the essence of
religion. Reviewing documents and myriad cross-cultural examples, Tylor
spends hundreds of pages addressing the prospect that belief in spiritual beings
might be found in all “levels” or “stages” of cultural evolution.
Despite all of this attention and effort, in a matter of a few short passages,
Tylor simply dismisses the possibility that the animism of the “lower” traditions
includes a moral component, maintaining that “lower animism is not immoral, it
is unmoral” and is “almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated
modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion” (Tylor, 1871b, 360).
Further:
One great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher
nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the religion of
the lower races. It is not that these races have no moral sense or no moral
standard, for both are strongly marked among them, if not in formal precept,
at least in that traditional consensus of society which we call public opinion,
according to which certain actions are held to be good or bad, right or wrong.
It is that the conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and
powerful in the higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower
(Tylor, 1871a, 427).
After appealing to a simple lack of evidence, Tylor reminds us of the virtues of
the synthesis of ethics–“actions held to be good or bad, right or wrong”–and
animism found in “higher culture”. Models of the good and bad are separate
from the religions of the “lower” cultures.
Tylor suggests that this separation accounts for another primary contrast
between “savage” and modern religions, namely, their views of death. Here,
the adherents of modern religions believe that where one goes after death is
contingent on what one does in this life (the “retribution-doctrine”) whereas
traditional religions simply go to another place (the “continuance-doctrine”):
Looking at religion from a political point of view, as a practical influence on
human society, it is clear that among its greatest powers has been its divine

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sanction of ethical laws, its theological enforcement of morality, its teaching of
moral government of the universe, its supplanting the ‘continuance-doctrine’
of a future life by the ‘retribution-doctrine’ supplying moral motive in the
present. But such alliance belongs almost wholly to religions above the
savage level, not to the earlier and lower creeds (Tylor, 1871b, 361).
Here, Tylor notes that religion can have “a practical influence on human society,”
the “greatest” of which is bolstering the moral order. Believing in an afterlife
that is based on what you do in this life was one such mechanism bolstering
the social order, a mechanism that exists “almost wholly” in societies that have
risen above states of savagery.
Again, it is not the case that Tylor denied that indigenous peoples lacked a
moral sense. He emphatically holds that both religion and morality are human
universals. Furthermore, it was not the case that Tylor saw no relationship
between religion and society at all. In fact, he suggests that “Among nation
after nation it is still clear how...human society and government became the
model on which divine society and government were shaped” (Tylor, 1871b,
248). Presaging later views (see Section 4), Tylor suggests that the structure of
a society’s religious world-view is a reflection of their actual social world. This
betrays Tylor’s intellectualism, the view that religion functions to help explain
the world. That is, religion’s role was to help people account for themselves.
So over the two volumes that gave birth to a new academic field, Tylor
managed to dismantle the then-prevalent idea that traditional populations lack
religion. He maintains the view that native religions do not “supply moral
motives” that guide constituents’ interactions with appeals to repercussions.
This had to evolve independently or, as he argues elsewhere, learned from
other “higher cultures” (Tylor, 1892). To the extent that progressivist theory
influenced his views of religion, we can surmise that Tylor viewed the supplying
of “moral motives” among the religions of those “above the savage level” as an
improvement over those of the “earlier and lower creeds.”
There was, however, some explicit resistance to Tylor’s claims about “savage”
or “primitive” religions and their connection to morality. For example, Andrew
Lang–one of Tylor’s students–was sceptical of his mentor’s “high a priori line
that savage minds are incapable of originating the notion of a moral Maker”
(A. Lang, 1909, xiv). He did not argue against Tylor on the grounds that
we should not consider entire cultural groups as having intrinsically better
qualities than others. Rather, Lang endorsed a competing view, namely, the
“degenerationist” or “devolutionary” theory. This theory posited that all humans
were originally united in one common culture and all contemporary cultural
diversity represents deviations from that common source (a religiously-couched

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corollary of this view held that all of humanity were once united in Babylon
and have since strayed). The goal of anthropology, then, was to search for the
original cultural complex and examine how various traits had either maintained
or dispensed with the original society’s ways. Of course, this view has long
since been discarded, as there is no evidence of such a culture and we know
that modern humanity’s common ancestors were foragers who lived in southern
Africa some 300,000 years ago (Schlebusch et al., 2017).
In this devolutionary spirit, Lang pondered the possibility that beliefs in
spiritual beings with “high moral attributes” might be one of Tylor’s “survivals”
of our original state and thus could have predated spirits and gods who play
“silly or obscene tricks [or are] lustful and false” (xv). In other words, Lang saw
beliefs in moralistic gods as not only common, but also indicative of humanity’s
once-united cultural state. Drawing upon his review of information about
Australian Aboriginal traditions, he points to the “high moral attributes” of their
deities, including one deity’s moral precepts. Among them include prescriptions
“To share everything they have with their friends” and “To live peaceably with
their friends” (181).
Lang also argued against Tylor’s view that “savage high gods” necessarily
have their origins in cultural borrowings from “higher” cultures. To do this,
he reviewed the then-extant cross-cultural evidence of traditions with gods
thought to be models of morality and those believed to directly punish people
for engaging in immoral behaviour (193-210). Summarising the state of the
field at the time, Lang goes on the offensive: “Anthropology holds the certainly
erroneous idea that the religion of the most backward races is always non-moral”
(256). In notably stark terms, Lang indicts the then-prevailing view of the
nascent field of anthropology. For different theoretical and methodological
reasons, the social sciences grew to concur with Lang’s conclusions.
For instance, one of the founders of modern sociology, Émile Durkheim
(2001 [1912]) saw morality as a central component to both conceptions of the
soul (194) and religion more generally. He even treated religion as a mechanism
for society:
No society can exist that does not feel the need at regular intervals to sustain
and reaffirm the collective feelings and ideas that constitute its unity and
its personality. Now, this moral remaking can be achieved only by means
of meetings, assemblies, or congregations in which individuals, brought
into close contact, reaffirm in common their common feelings: hence those
ceremonies whose goals, results, and methods do not differ in kind from
properly religious ceremonies (322).
Here, Durkheim equates “morality” with a society’s sense of “unity” and

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identity; morality is what holds societies together, makes them what and who
they are. As complexes of regulatory practices and beliefs, Durkheim sees
religion as a means by which societies maintain this sense of unity. As it includes
mechanisms found in the secular world and organizes people into “meetings,
assemblies, and congregations,” religion forges moral bonds between people
and can thus contribute to the sustainability of a society.
In summary, then, while Tylor saw no relationship between morality and
“savage” religions, Lang saw this relationship manifest in beliefs about the gods
and their espoused principles, and Durkheim saw it in the way religious institu-
tions contribute to social solidarity. Over the next half century, anthropological
consensus grew to side with the facts stressed by Lang and Durkheim, though
having long-abandoned the theoretical commitments of Lang and Tylor. A
confluence of new developments shaped the social scientific view of religion
and morality, namely, ethnographic fieldwork, increased appreciation of the rela-
tionship between society and subsistence, and the commitment to understanding
societies’ traditions on their own terms.
3.3 Society, Function, and Fieldwork
In the 1930s, fueled by what a generation of ethnographic field researchers
had learned directly from traditional people, celebrated anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski witnessed and theorised the close association between religious
beliefs, practice, and morality: “Every religion, primitive or developed, presents
the three main aspects, dogmatic, ritual, and ethical...It is equally important to
grasp the essential interrelation of these three aspects, to recognize that they are
only really three facets of the same essential fact” (Malinowski, 2014, 134-135).
Even commenting on how long it had taken scientists of humanity to come to
terms with this, he expounds on this interrelation:
That every organized belief implies a congregation, must have been felt by
many thinkers instructed by scholarship and common sense. Yet...science was
slow to incorporate the dictates of simple and sound reason...[that find] that
worship always happens in common because it touches common concerns of
the community. And here...enters the ethical element intrinsically inherent in
all religious activities. They always require efforts, discipline, and submission
on the part of the individual for the good of the community (Malinowski,
2014, 137, emphasis added).
In this passage, Malinowski sees the relationship between morality and the
gods as encoded in religious behaviour. Here, he explicitly associates “worship”

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with exerting individual “effort, discipline, and submission” to benefit one’s
community; the “ethical element...inherent in all religious activities” contributes
to the “good of the community.” These contributions come at a cost to
individuals–they take “efforts, discipline, and submission” and are therefore
neither obviously nor immediately in individuals’ immediate self-interest. As
we’ll see in Section 6, this economic emphasis of religion’s costs and benefits
has since become standard in some contemporary evolutionary views of religion.
For now, let’s attend to the theory underlying Malinowski’s views.
Generally, Malinowski sought to account for the rise and persistence of
certain cultural traits. In his view, such traditions fulfil different needs. Defining
function as the process of satisfying those needs (Malinowski, 1944, 159), he
spells out an early functionalist theory of culture:
•
“Culture is essentially an instrumental apparatus by which man is put in a
position to better cope with the concrete specific problems that face him in
his environment in the course of the satisfaction of his needs.
•
“It is a system of objects, activities, and attitudes in which every part exists
as a means to an end.
•
“Such activities, attitudes and objects are organized around important and
vital tasks into institutions such as family, the clan, the local community,
the tribe, and the organized teams of economic coöperation, political, legal,
and educational activity” (150)
Here, Malinowski asserts that culture is a tool with which people fix problems.
Some of those challenges stem from social organisation and domains such as
economy, law, and education. Much like Durkheim’s (2001 [1912]) view of
religion as fulfilling the “need...[for society] to sustain and reaffirm the collective
feelings and ideas that constitute its unity and its personality” (322), Malinowski
saw religion as addressing “common concerns of the community” (Malinowski,
2014, 137). This conviction–and the theory underlying it–became standard for
anthropology. The recognition of this inextricable link between morality and
religion became so standard, in fact, that major voices in the field eventually
treated it as self-evident.
Consider the sentiments of E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1965), the leading anthro-
pologist of religion of his time. In a poignant critique of previous generations’
efforts, he notes that:
it was [once] held that primitive people must have the crudest religious
conceptions...This may further be illustrated in the condescending argument,
once it was ascertained beyond doubt that primitive peoples, even the hunters
and collectors, have gods with high moral attributes, that they must have

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borrowed the idea, or just the word without comprehension of its meaning,
from a higher culture, from missionaries, traders, and others...Modern
research has shown that little value can be attributed to statements of this sort”
(Evans-Pritchard, 1965, 107)
Here, Evans-Pritchard identifies the relationship between morality and the gods
by their utility as models of morality and virtue. Not only does Evans-Pritchard
acknowledge that small-scale foragers “have gods with high moral attributes,”
but he characterizes the view that they must have borrowed such a belief from
outsiders as “condescending” (see Schebesta & Schütze, 1957, 1-10, for a
detailed treatment of this issue).
Indeed, it is not difficult to find links of various kinds between religion and
morality in the ethnographies of various indigenous societies around the world.
A causal scan of ethnographic records suggests many hints and explicit accounts
of gods having some link with behaviours that might be construed as “moral”:
•
the Inuit (global Arctic) Sedna myth is about the supernatural consequences
of selfishness where white bears punish people for ancestral Inuits’ moral
transgressions (Turner, 1894, 261-262)
•
the Siouan (American Great Plains) notion of wakan tanka (lit. sacred
vastness) is recorded in 1896 as an omnipresent, omniscient, entity interested
in human behaviour (Walker, 1980, 75) and Siouan religion is indigenously
characterized as forbidding “the [avaricious] accumulation of wealth and
the enjoyment of luxury” (Eastman, 1911, 9)
•
in Nuer society (East Africa), “such moral faults as meanness, disloyalty,
dishonesty, slander, lack of deference to seniors, and so forth, cannot be
entirely dissociated from sin, for God may punish them even if those who
have suffered from them take no action of their own account” (Evans-
Pritchard, 1956, 193)
•
Paliyan (South India) gods are believed to “punish incest, theft, or murder
with an accident or illness” (Gardner, 1972, 434)
•
a G/wi (Southern Africa) god’s “anger is expected if some taboos are broken
and as a result of certain acts...in order to show man’s lack of arrogance
and thereby to avoid [N!adima’s] displeasure...Death and other misfortunes
are sometimes attributed to his anger” (Silberbauer, 1972, 319)
•
some members of the related Dobe Ju/’hoansi report that spirits “expect
certain behaviour of us. We must eat so, and act so. When you are
quarrelsome and unpleasant to other people, and people are angry with you,
the //gangwasi see this and come to kill you. The //gangwasi can judge
who is right and who is wrong” (Lee, 2003, 129-130)
•
among the Dogrib (Canadian Northwest), “Wrongdoing [e.g., ‘slacker[s],

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Psychology of Religion 13
womanizer[s], and other transgressors of...norms’] might incur the visitation
of supernatural illness” (Helm, 1972, 79)
•
elements of moralistic punishment are in Matsigenkan (northwestern South
America) folktales (Izquierdo, Johnson, & Shepard Jr, 2008; A. Johnson,
2003)
For at least two reasons, none of them would surprise the likes of Malinowski
and Evans-Pritchard. First, they witnessed and theorised the moral content
and/or function of traditional religions. Second, they would appreciate that
these observations come from ethnographic fieldwork, synthetic anthropological
works, and directly from indigenous people themselves rather than explorers,
missionaries, and armchair anthropologists. Even if these were exceptional
views, the content of these observations nevertheless run counter to the strong
sentiments of early missionaries and social theorists like Tylor.
Yet, others contemporaneous with Evans-Pritchard maintained opposing
views just as stark as those expressed by previous generations. For instance,
anthropologist Elman Service (1966) suggests that “primitive religious ideology
has no moral or ethical content whatsoever...because band societies are small
and based on kinship, morality is taught within the family, just as is etiquette”
(71; emphasis added). In keeping with the functionalist commitments of the
time, Service declared that “values are not preached or buttressed by threat of
religious reprisal in band societies because they do not need to be. There is no
larger, impersonal context of behaviour where it is difficult to practice them”
(72). Importantly, Service notes that “we worry mostly about morality in the
larger society, outside the sphere of kindred and close friends. Primitive people
do not have these worries because they do not conceive of–do not have–the
larger society to adjust to. The ethic does not extend to strangers; they are simply
enemies, not even ‘people”’ (72). In other words, small-scale communities
don’t need supernatural sanctions for moral behaviour because they can police
themselves; the religions of traditional populations don’t have this function
because there is no need. In striking terms, Service suggests that traditional
populations effectively treat outsiders as sub-human enemies, and a focus on
morality emerges only when people have to interact with numerous others. If
religion has a moral function, it isn’t applicable in contexts where the need is
already satisfied.
So, the first century of anthropology included a debate about how central
and universal morality was in the religious sphere. Even contemporaneous
researchers with access to the same ethnographic record achieved remarkably
divergent views, often even drawing from the same theoretical orientation. One
functionalist view holds that all societies need maintenance and religion is one

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14 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
way of providing the moral glue necessary to hold them together. Another
suggests that religion doesn’t really do this in small-scale societies because they
derive their bonds by other means. How then would we go about reasonably
reconciling the two views?
From a methodological perspective, we could be sceptical about both
positions; both generalize about a wide range of traditional societies and it is
easy to make sweeping generalisations or cherry-pick examples to substantiate
one’s views. The essential question here, then, is how safe such conclusions are.
Framed probabilistically, the question becomes: what is the likelihood that a
small-scale society links morality to their religious tradition? To address this
question, the subsequent generation of social scientists developed cross-cultural
datasets. As we’ll see, these resources allowed researchers to assess global
patterns of culture, thus bringing a more systematic empirical approach to
bear on such debates. However, they also carried considerable baggage that
subsequent generations unfortunately inherited.
4 Societal Typologies and the Quantification of
Culture8
In their quest to understand human variation, previous generations developed
standards for documenting and theorising about the world’s cultural variation.
As this documentation increased in detail and sophistication, researchers in-
creasingly abandoned the erroneous conceits of progressive models of cultural
evolution. The more cross-cultural data anthropologists accumulated, the less
satisfying casual observation and hasty generalisations became. Newer, more
nuanced models linked cultural traits together. Furthermore, theory steadily
became more inclined to examine traditions in light of the functions they served
and the processes that contributed to their development.
Are there common cultural traditions found around the world? What explains
them? Are some societies more likely to have some cultural traits than others?
Why? With the expectations of rigorously collected ethnographic data and a
global perspective afforded by the belvedere of academia, researchers began to
categorize societies and cultural traits in discrete and formally comparable ways.
This facilitated the quantitative study of sociocultural evolution. As we’ll see,
the link between religion and morality played a major role in the development
of these tools.
8
This section draws from Lightner et al. (2023), Purzycki and McKay (2023), and Purzycki and
Watts (2018).

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4.1 Societal Typologies
Societal typologies subsequent to those of Morgan and Tylor grounded
human organisation in a society’s economy. Rather than the gradual trial-
and-error improvement of making a living as suggested in previous models,
newer approaches explained many cultural traits by virtue of the way societies
made a living. One influential model came from Elman Service (1962) who
discussed four society types–bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (Table 1).
These society types were linked to subsistence; bands are foragers, tribes engage
in horticulture or herding (pastoralism), agriculturalists tend towards chiefdoms,
and industrialized states typically have market economies. In this model, the
domestication of food represents a primary mechanism forincreasing population
size. The intensification of food production fostered economic and professional
specialisation; as we go from bands to states, there are more possible roles that
people can fill by virtue of the fact that fewer people can produce enough to
sustain greater numbers.
type economy pop. size decisions religion
band foraging 25-100 egalitarian shamanic
tribe hort./herding ≈500 collective communal
chiefdom agriculture >500 representative Olympian
state industrial lots top-down monotheistic
Table 1 Service’s model of societal variation with Wallace’s corresponding
religious types. Economic specialisation increases from bands to states. Note
that population sizes are inferred based on Service’s discussion throughout the
text (see pp. 58-59).
Again, as is appreciated now, such a model is not progressive; societies are not
naturally developing toward inherently better industrial states and there are many
pathways to societal change. There have been many cases of massive state-level
societies breaking down into agglomerations of small-scale societies (e.g., the
Maya) or complex chiefdom societies from previously horticultural-hunting
contexts that became subsistence hunters when introduced to new contexts
(e.g., Siouan groups dominating the American Great Plains and adopting
bison-hunting).
Service’s scheme continues to be useful; while crude and can tempt us to
think progressively, this model nonetheless helps generate new inferences about
a wide range of cultural traits, particularly when coupled with other theoretical

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16 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
frames and observations (for a more contemporary view, see Kaplan, Hooper, &
Gurven, 2009). If we know how a society procured food, for example, we can
make reasonable predictions about its predominant form of political decision-
making. Bands, for example, are typically egalitarian and make decisions
collectively (Boehm, 1993) whereas states tend to make decisions in a top-down
fashion. Furthermore, the model offers a mechanism–food production–as an
important driver of societal change. In other words, if we know something
about how a society makes a living, we can predict a lot about cultural forms,
including aspects of religion.
Take, for instance, how anthropologist A. R. Wallace (1966) built upon
this general scheme. While he did not explicitly appeal to Service’s model,
Wallace’s typology of religions certainly corresponds to it (see Table 1). Here,
the content and structures of religion and society co-evolve; egalitarian bands
with a more equitable distribution of decision-making power also tend to have
shamanic traditions where spirits are distributed throughout the landscape. In
contrast, the structures of chiefdoms correspond to structures of polytheism
where important figureheads are “at the top” with increasing numbers of those
with less influence are “at the bottom.” According to the model, states–societies
with hyper-concentrations of power–trend toward having monotheistic high
gods with supreme power. Like we saw with Tylor and Durkheim, Wallace’s
model really suggests that these religious types are reflections of how a society
is structured.
But Wallace also appreciated the utility of functionalism to the extent that
functions were the caused effects of other phenomena (1966:167-171). In
Wallace’s view, asking the question of what religion’s function is does not give
us any purchase of religion’s genesis or maintenance. While Durkheim and
Malinowski suggest that societies exist as a function of the moral bolstering of
religion, Wallace suggests that to address “why religion?,” we instead need to
ask what religion is a function of: what causes religious phenomena and their
variation?
Regarding the relationship between morality and religion, Wallace’s view is
in keeping with the anthropological wisdom of the time, asserting that “In every
society there is a sacred oral or written literature which asserts what is truth in
religion. This code...contains the moral injunctions of prophets and of gods”
(57). Thus, the moral dictates of the gods are central to all religious traditions.
Further, he notes that “Contrary to some popular impressions and to Tylor’s early
summary of observations (1871), even the most primitive peoples often regard
violation of the moral code as entailing the threat of supernatural punishment,”
qualifying that “Supernatural sanctions for morality are more likely to be invoked
in societies where there are, between persons, considerable social differences

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Psychology of Religion 17
derived from differences in wealth” (193). Unlike his predecessors, Wallace
could appeal to cross-cultural, quantitative data. Citing a landmark achievement,
namely, sociologist Guy Swanson’s (1964) cross-cultural study, The Birth of the
Gods, Wallace effectively united the anthropology of religion with a revolution
in cross-cultural inquiry.
4.2 The Birth of Cross-Cultural Datasets
As the Service-Wallace model suggests, once worldwide observations of
other, non-European populations became more commonplace, patterns in the
beliefs, practices, and other cultural traits became easier to make. However,
while Service and Wallace’s models are useful, how reliable are they? How
representative are they of the populations they claim to describe? How reliable
and robust are the relationships we think are out there? As noted earlier, it is
easy enough to cherry-pick examples and counter-examples to support or refute
a specific argument. It is another task entirely to systematically and reliably
assess whether a pattern exists.
Recognising these issues, anthropologists Murdock and White (1969) wrote
that
When faced with problems of this sort, scientists resort to statistics. Dis-
trustful of ad hoc interpretations of single instances, they examine a large
and representative number of cases to determine whether the postulated
relationships among relevant variables are quantitatively substantiated. This
is precisely the rationale of cross-cultural research (330).
Because of the uncertainty and informality associated with single-shot qualitative
observations, social scientists increasingly embraced the used of quantitative
data and its analysis. Interestingly, this demand led to the compilation and
development of cross-cultural repositories and databases of materials about
far-flung populations. Central to their process was the quantification of previous
generations’ qualitative reports.
As it turns out, one of the first–if not the first–quantitative cross-cultural
databases was devoted to understanding the relationship between religion and
society (for what may be the first cross-cultural database using categorical codes,
see Murdock, 1957). Swanson’s The Birth of the Gods (1964) represents a
remarkable step forward in the social sciences.
Swanson and his two assistants scoured ethnographic materials from 50
diverse societies from around the world (32-37). Focusing on a host of variables
ranging from whether societies had debt and social classes to supernatural

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18 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
sanctions for morality and beliefs in magic, this small team converted qualitative
ethnographic observations into quantitative data (e.g., Is reincarnation present?;
0 = absent; 1 = present–in human form; 2 = present–in animal form).
9
The book
then applies a variety of statistical tests to assess various hypotheses of interest.
Swanson’s dataset–and others like it–is really about the available and/or
sampled ethnographic record, not necessarily the ethnographic reality behind
it. We’ll revisit this point later, but it helps to remind ourselves how some
information might be lost, ignored, or created by virtue of the production of
ethnographic materials and its subsequent quantification (Cronk, 1998; Watts
et al., 2022). Even the best ethnographies ignore some aspects of their target
society. As a consequence, there might not be anything to quantify. Moreover,
some domains are a primary focus for ethnographers, while others are peripheral
to their interests. What happens when an ethnographer doesn’t mention a
particular trait? In Swanson’s view, there are two reasons why we might treat the
absence of evidence as evidence of absence (51). First, he assumes that Western
ethnographers would be likely to report, for example, a “high, monotheistic god”
because such gods are similar to their own cultural backgrounds. Second, he
assumes that ethnographers would only bother to document the absence of a
trait only when that absence is surprising or notable in some important way. He
recognizes that maintaining this set of assumptions “will undoubtedly lead us
into some errors,” though the severity and prevalence of such errors are left
unaddressed. Swanson ultimately appeals to the utility of the assumption on the
grounds that a proper study needs data, that is, “we need as many judgements
about as many of the societies in our sample as possible” (51-52). So, there
might be some errors by adopting these assumptions, but to him, the benefits of
doing a study with more data outweigh the costs of introducing errors in that
data.
To his credit, Swanson makes these assumptions explicit. But how safe are
they? We might just as easily assume the converse idea that ethnographers
would not bother reporting things that are common or well-understood by
their anthropological peers. Considering the ethnographer’s primary job is to
document and account for human variation, they might naturally emphasise
the differences found in the societies they study rather than the similarities,
even if they are present (Naroll & Naroll, 1963). Furthermore, it might be the
case that some topics are ignored because of more salient activities. So, for
example, beliefs in a “high god” might be present in a society, but they might
9
In terms of scientific transparency and reproducibility, this little volume was way ahead of
its time. Not only does it include the entire data set, but it also provides: a) definitions for its 39
variables, b) all ethnographic source materials Swanson and his team coded, and c) the general
rules by which they followed to code the data.

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have been ignored because, say, ancestor spirits were more often discussed in
daily activities and ritual activities were more notable. We’ll return to this issue
later. Keeping these issues in mind, let us first examine Swanson’s theoretical
motivations behind the topic at hand.
In the chapter “The Supernatural and Morality,” Swanson briefly surveys the
intellectual history of the topic, suggesting that “The people of modern Western
nations are so steeped in these beliefs which bind religion and morality, that they
find it hard to conceive of societies which separate the two” (153). He proceeds
to discuss Tylor’s, Malinowski’s, and other influential thinkers’ views on the
subject (see Section 3), concluding that “We can be certain that Tylor’s view is
not universally valid for primitive societies, but that it does fit some of them”
(155). Swanson suggests that much of the disagreement between Tylor and
Malinowski are to be found in their unclear and inconsistent use of “morality.”
Unfortunately, Swanson does not help us much in the effort to clarify
what “morality” refers to. In summarising the differences between Tylor’s and
Malinowski’s views, he rests on the following: “Morals are social rules which
specify the behaviours required of those who enter moral relationships and
seek to maintain them” (156) and “a moral relationship exists to the extent that
self-conscious beings intentionally and freely facilitate the achievement of one
another’s goals and intentionally and freely accept this facilitation from each
other” (157). So, “moral relationships” are partnerships that allow the involved
parties to achieve each other’s goals. Moral rules are the guidelines that must
be followed to facilitate the moral relationships. It is anything one ought to
do when helping others achieve their desires. Thus, this particular definition
allows just about anything interpersonal to fall under the aegis of “moral” (e.g.,
sitting in one’s seat in a classroom would thus be a “moral” issue with respect
to facilitating a teacher’s job).
Drawing from this, he concludes that “It would be strange indeed if the
deities which represent sovereign groups were totally indifferent to actions which
violate the bonds of loyalty that bind members to those groups” (159) and while
“the ethnographic evidence supports the judgment that moral relations between
particular individuals are not always subjected to supernatural sanctions...in
some respects, the supernatural is frequently involved in supporting human
morality” (ibid.). Thus, there remains variation to be explained. In his quest to
understand this variation, Swanson offers three theoretical predictions:
•
“Any important but unstable moral relationship between individuals...will
evoke supernatural sanctions to buttress their fragile association” (159)
•
“Supernatural controls cannot be exercised over interpersonal relations

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20 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
unless the number of persons having interests peculiar to themselves has
become great enough to create a large number of social relations in which
people interact as particular individuals, rather than as members of some
group” (160)
•
“Supernatural controls are exercised over interpersonal relations in all
societies, but this belief becomes explicit only when the conditions cited
under the first hypothesis force people to become aware of the facts” (160).
In terms of theory, while these three hypotheses all have functional implica-
tions inasmuch as they suggest that appeals to supernatural punishment can
have an effect, Swanson stresses the conditions under which gods and other
spiritual agents (e.g., karma or mana) will be explicitly associated with moral
relationships: a) when moral relationships are important and delicate; b) when
there are considerable competing interests among individuals to manage; and c)
when people are aware of how important and delicate their moral relationships
are. The third hypothesis is notable for a few reasons. First, it declares that all
societies exhibit supernatural controls over interpersonal relations. Second, it
brings hypotheses to a measurable, almost psychological level by identifying the
conditions under which religion becomes explicitly–rather than tacitly–about
morality. We will revisit this distinction between religion’s implicit and explicit
moral relevance in the next section.
Swanson admits that he can’t directly test these hypotheses using his data.
Instead, he operationalises (i.e., converts concepts into measurable units) moral-
istic supernatural sanctions by examining the reported presence of supernatural
sanctions across indices of things that might threaten moral relationships such
as “debt relations, social classes, [and] individually owned property” (162).
This is a curiously narrow subset of the moral domain! He also admits that one
of the more sizeable problems with coding this data is
the absence of direct evidence that particular relationships between people
meet our criteria of morality or that the persons concerned are interacting as
particular individuals rather than as members of a group. All one can say is
that the records contain those instances in which sanctions of supernatural
origin are applied to persons because these persons help or harm other
members of the same society (163-164, emphasis added).
In this admission, “moral” now means “help or harm,” thus offering something
a little more concrete and precise in the way of what “moral” means that he
offered earlier. In terms of method, Swanson once again points to the gulf
between ethnographic reality, theoretical constructs, their operationalisation,

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Psychology of Religion 21
and the source material used to create data. Given these caveats, what do the
data show?
According to Swanson’s data, 67% of the groups have sampled records
mentioning supernatural sanctions for behaviours that “help or harm other
members of the same society” (33/49 as one’s population size was uncertain).
That means that only 16 societies’ records lacked mention or reported the
absence of supernatural sanctions for morality. Figure 1a shows this across
population sizes. If we take Service’s model seriously, even among those
smallest of societies with populations under 50 people (likely foragers), there are
roughly as many with (53%) moralistic supernatural sanctions as those without
(47%). In other words, half of the smallest societies were reported to have
moralistic supernatural punishment. Furthermore, it is clear that the presence
of supernatural sanctions for morality are steadily present at least at this level
across population sizes. Figure 1b shows that roughly half (45%) of all societies
whose principal source of food is collecting and gathering, fishing, or hunting
have reported instance of moralistic supernatural punishment.
1−49 50−399 400−9,999 >9,999
0.0 0.4 0.8 1.2
abs./unrep.
reported
prop. of pop. size
population size (Swanson)
(a)
other foragers
0.0 0.4 0.8
prop. of subs. type
subsistence (Swanson)
abs./unrep.
reported
(b)
01234
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
# indicators of wealth (Swanson)
prop. of state
abs./unrep.
reported (c)
01234
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
jurisdictional levels (SCCS)
prop. with moralistic high gods
abs./unrep
moral. high god
(d)
Figure 1 Barplot of distribution of supernatural sanctions for morality across
(a) population sizes, (b) foraging, and (c) indicators of wealth in Swanson’s data
set. Panel (d) is the distribution of absent or unreported “high” gods and
reported moralistic high gods across number of jurisdictional levels (i.e.,
column proportions from Table 2; missing values not considered) in the SCCS.
Swanson also assessed the relationship between number of indicators of

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22 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
wealth disparities and the presence of supernatural sanctions for “help or harm
[toward] other members of the same society” (164; Figure 1c). Out of the 50
societies studied, only 37 had “pertinent data” (168).
10
While the numbers
are low, 76% of this truncated sample have records indicating the presence
of supernatural sanctions, suggesting that “these sanctions are widespread in
our sample” (168). After conducting a multitude of tests, Swanson concludes
that, “Contrary to Tylor’s formulation, a considerable proportion of the simpler
peoples do make a connection between supernatural sanctions and moral
behavior” (174, emphasis added).
In terms of accounting for the variation in types of beliefs, moralistic
“sanctions are more likely to appear in societies in which there are interpersonal
differences according to wealth” (174). The most generous we can be about
this particular finding is that there is a correlation; we do not know what causes
what (for critique, see Peregrine, 1996). Do such beliefs develop in response to
the accumulation of wealth? Do they function to reduce inequality? Or do such
beliefs curb self-indulgence? These two traits–moralistic supernatural sanctions
and wealth disparities–could also co-evolve. As we’ll see, subsequent efforts
have tried to address these questions more rigorously.
Swanson’s text also includes a chapter dedicated to monotheism, which he
defines “as the first cause of all effects and the necessary and sufficient condition
for reality’s continued existence” (55). Here, Swanson also defines “high gods”
as creator deities that are “ultimately responsible for all events, whether as
history’s creator, its director, or both” (56). Merging these two criteria into a
single “high gods” construct, Swanson finds that the presence of such gods tends
to be associated with societies with more sovereign, hierarchically structured
organisation and those with more than a single sovereign communal group. This
resonates with the Service-Wallace model; hierarchical societies with bureaucra-
cies have gods that resemble chairmen. While these aspects of social complexity
indicate the presence of high gods, others, such as occupational specialisation,
are less clear. As it turns out, Swanson’s high gods variable contributed to
resources that spawned decades of cross-cultural research. Unfortunately, due to
the heavy reliance on “high gods,” this research lost sight of the global ubiquity
of moralistic supernatural sanctions that had been appreciated for generations
and tested and confirmed by Swanson’s important contribution.
10
It’s curious that in this case, Swanson does not equate absence of evidence with evidence of
absence. This raises the question of why one might apply this principle in one domain but not in
another. An ethnographer might ignore something like kinship terminology or even women’s roles
in society, but we wouldn’t deny either existed and certainly wouldn’t presume they were absent.
Yet, we often see the same logic applied to religious traits.

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4.3 High Gods, Morality, and Social Complexity
Recall Murdock and White’s appeal for the quantification of cross-cultural
data. This quote appeared in the inaugural article profiling the Standard
Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), a cross-cultural database of many variables
regarding 186 different societies. The SCCS is a calculated subsample of the
more encompassing Ethnographic Atlas (EA, Murdock, 1967). Murdock and
White designed this subsample specifically to avoid what is known as “Galton’s
Problem” (Naroll, 1961, 1965).
In response to a lecture by E. B. Tylor (1889), Francis Galton raised the issue
that when trying to functionally explain the cross-cultural presence of certain
traditions, one must be sure to attend to the possibility that cultural parentage
or borrowing might explain why two or more populations share the target trait.
Having a massive number of populations in a database–some of which are
interacting with each other, were historically the same group, or are learning
traits from a common source (e.g., colonial powers or missionaries)–might
muddy any analyses that presume cultural independence.
While Murdock spearheaded these projects, Swanson directly contributed
to their development. Like Swanson’s data, the EA and SCCS consist of
quantitative data derived from qualitative reports. Unlike Swanson’s data,
however, both draw from a wider range of source types beyond ethnography,
including reports from missionaries and travellers and holy books (e.g., the
Bible is one source for the Hebrews).
11
Furthermore, while the data in The
Birth of the Gods were largely devoted to religious data, the EA and SCCS have
only a few variables pertaining to religion and only one variable that addresses
gods’ association with morality.
Coming directly from Swanson (1964), the “high god” variable (V34 and
V238 of the EA and SCCS respectively) indicates the presence of various states
of having a “high god” as recorded and coded in the records from which the EA
and SCCS drew. According to these sources, a “high god” is: “a spiritual being
who is believed to have created all reality and/or to be its ultimate governor, even
though his/her sole act was to create other spirits who, in turn, created or control
the natural world” (Swanson, 1964, 210). In addition to “data unavailable” (see
Dow and Eff, 2009 for discussion of missing data in the SCCS), there are four
categorical options as possible values for high gods:
0. absent or not reported [in the materials]
11
The qualitative texts from which these datasets are derived are stored in the Human Area
Relations Files repository (Ember, 2007). Revised versions of the EA and SCCS can be obtained at
D-PLACE, a database repository, https://d-place.org/.

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24 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
1. present but not active in human affairs
2.
present and active in human affairs but not supportive of human morality
3. present, active, and specifically supportive of human morality
Recall the earlier issue regarding the absence of evidence Swanson raised.
Since these are data coded from qualitative materials–and we know a little about
the quality of such records (Section 3)–we might adopt a little more caution
and maintain that just because a trait is not reported doesn’t mean it should
be considered absent. The authors of some sources might have overlooked a
trait, perhaps they didn’t ask, or perhaps they had their own agendas. In fact,
the sources characterising the Abipón Indians as “slow, dull and stupid” were
among those that led to the coding of their high gods as “absent or not reported”
in the EA and SCCS! Yet, this coding scheme explicitly conflates the options
of “absent” and “not reported” and without looking at the source material, we
wouldn’t know why the data wound up being coded this way. Even when we do,
the answers are not immediately forthcoming.
0 1 2 3 4 NA
abs./unreported 43 (63%) 13 (19%) 4 (6%) 4 (6%) 4 (6%) 0
inactive 17 (36%) 15 (32%) 6 (13%) 3 (6%) 6 (13%) 0
active, non-moral 8 (62%) 2 (15%) 3 (23%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0
active, moral 6 (15%) 13 (33%) 7 (18%) 11 (28%) 2 (5%) 1
NA 8 5 3 1 0 1
Table 2 Frequencies of high god code types across levels of jurisdictional
hierarchy levels from SCCS. High god code types correspond to categories
detailed above. NA refers to “data unavailable.” Row proportions do not
include NA values.
Furthermore, there are numerous cases of gods and spirits that are clearly
associated with morality that aren’t specifically high gods. Consider the
traditionally horticulturalist Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea and the foraging
Ainu of Japan. Both societies are coded as having “absent or unreported” high
gods. The former are coded as having one level of jurisdictional hierarchy,
while the latter are coded as having two. Yet, the literature used to code these
values reveals an explicit association between traditional gods and morality:

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Psychology of Religion 25
Source Data
Swanson (1964) coded data
Murdock (1967) EA
Murdock and White (1969) SCCS
Simpson (1984) SCCS
J. P. Gray (1987) SCCS
Peregrine (1996) coded data
Snarey (1996) SCCS
Stark (2001) AWC, WVS
Roes and Raymond (2003) EA, SCCS
D. D. P. Johnson (2005) SCCS
Boehm (2008) coded data
Sanderson and Roberts (2008) SCCS
C. Brown and Eff (2010) SCCS
Atkinson and Bourrat (2011) WVS
Bourrat, Atkinson, and Dunbar (2011) SCCS
Purzycki (2011) quant. ethnographic
Peoples and Marlowe (2012) SCCS
Purzycki (2013a) quant. ethnographic
Botero et al. (2014) EA
Roes (2014) EA, SCCS
Baumard, et al. (2015) coded data
Turchin et al. (2015) SESHAT
Watts, Greenhill, et al. (2015) Pulotu
Watts, Sheehan, et al. (2015) Pulotu
Peoples, Duda, and Marlowe (2016) SCCS
Purzycki et al. (2016) ERM
Ge, Chen, Wu, and Mace (2019) experimental
M. Lang et al. (2019) ERM
Whitehouse et al. (2019 [RETRACTED]) SESHAT
Jackson, et al (2020) SCCS
Skoggard, et al. (2020) SCCS
Townsend, et al. (2020) quant. ethnographic
Ember, et al. (2021) SCCS
Singh, et al. (2021) quant. ethnographic
Danielson et al. (2022) DRH
Purzycki, Willard, et al. (2022) ERM
Turchin et al. (2023b) SESHAT
Bentzen and Gokmen (2022) EA, SCCS
Bendixen et al. (2023) ERM
Table 3 Resources and empirical works on the topic of morality and the
gods including cross-cultural data or data from non-Western societies.
Sources are as follows: EA - Ethnographic Atlas; SCCS - Standard
Cross-Cultural Sample; AWC - Atlas of World Cultures; WVS - World Values
Survey; DRH - Database of Religious History; ERM - Evolution of Religion
and Morality Project

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If the Orokaiva, by and large, order their lives by the same moral principles,
they would explain this by their common belief in certain demigods whom
they all regard as their ancestors and as sources of authority, and who created
certain institutions embodying moral norms to which they all subscribe. Not
only do they obey the precepts of these demi-gods, they also re-enact their
feats in ritual and identify with them during ceremonies, and in many of their
regular expressive activities (Schwimmer, 1973, 51).
The power of the deities is demonstrated to the Ainu not only through their
beneficial power in providing abundant food and general welfare but also
through their power to punish by causing an illness if offended . . . The ultimate
cause of these illnesses lies with humans, who can please these beings so
that they remain beneficial or benign or break a taboo and bring about their
own misfortune. Thus, an illness is incurred by breaking moral codes against
deities or other soul-bearing beings of the universe, or by breaking social
codes against fellow Ainu with the use of offensive remarks (Ohnuki-Tierney,
1981, 80).
So, even if these traditions lack high gods, they do appear to include gods that
are unambiguously associated with morality. As such, if our interest lies in the
relationship between morality and the gods, relying on the high gods variable
will mislead.
With these caveats in mind, what do the data tell us? Table 2 reports the raw
data across different levels of “jurisdictional hierarchy,” a variable often used to
denote social complexity. Just by eyeballing these data, we can see that over
half of the societies in the SCCS have one level of jurisdictional hierarchy or
less. Sixty-eight (37%) societies were coded with “absent or not reported” high
gods with nearly a quarter (43) of the entire sample were societies lacking high
gods and had no levels of jurisdictional hierarchy. In terms of the distribution
of moralistic high gods in the sample, there really isn’t much of a pattern to see
across jurisdictional hierarchy (see Figure 1d). The proportion of moralistic
high gods present increases slightly as we increase jurisdictional levels, but
drops again at the highest level of societal complexity.
Many studies have exploited this variable in the EA and SCCS data sets
(see Table 3). Notably, while each report offers a novel spin on the subject, all
that use the SCCS data find that social complexity and/or its correlates predict
moralistic high gods. Some find that subsistence predicts the presence of high
gods (e.g., Simpson, 1984; Underhill, 1975), but given the concentration of
“absent/not reported” values among societies with no levels of jurisdictional
hierarchy (presumably foragers), this should be unsurprising.
In one article, Snarey (1996) looks beyond social complexity and mode

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of subsistence and assesses the relationship between water scarcity and the
presence of high gods “specifically supportive of human morality.” Snarey’s
hypothesis is stated as follows: “In societies in which ensuring a sufficient
supply of water is difficult, the members of that society will be significantly more
likely to conceive of a Supreme Deity who is concerned with, and supportive of,
human morality”’ (88). While the prediction is relatively clear, the reason why
“Supreme Deities”–rather than any type of morally-concerned deity–matter here
is not explained. So, the relationship between morality, the gods, and water
scarcity is actually measured in terms of high gods. Snarey found evidence
consistent with his hypothesis.
Nearly a decade later, Roes and Raymond (2003) used the EA and SCCS to
assess the relationship between population size, external conflict, and religion.
Drawing from evolutionary biologist Richard D. Alexander’s theory of morality
(1987, see below) that holds that intergroup conflict over resources boosts
population size, the authors wager that one mechanism to hold such large
populations together are beliefs in “moralising gods.” Specifically, “Belief in
these gods signals acceptance of the rules and...we expect more support for the
rules (and thus more belief in moralising gods) in larger societies” (128). Using
jurisdictional hierarchy as an index of society size, the authors indeed find a
positive relationship between society size and the presence of moralising high
gods. Like Snarey, the authors make no clear justification for why moralising
high gods would matter more or less than any moralising god. Thus, we see the
recurrence of the conflation of moralising gods with moralising high gods.
In one analysis, sociologist Rodney Stark (2001) examined cross-cultural
and -national data to test four hypotheses for reasons that should be, to some
extent, familiar at this point:
•“In many societies, religion and morality will not be linked.
•“This linkage will tend to be limited to more complex cultures.
•
“The effects of religiousness on individual morality are contingent on
images of gods as conscious, morally-concerned beings; religiousness
based on impersonal or unmoral gods will not influence moral choices
•
“Participation in religious rites and rituals will have little or no independent
effect on morality” (621-622).
To assess the first two hypotheses, Stark exploits the Atlas of World Cultures,
another subset of Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas that includes the standard
high gods variable. He finds correlations with the (reported) presence of
moralistic high gods and the following indices of “cultural complexity”: dairy,
domestication of large animals, state society, metalwork, weaving, agriculture,
and pottery (623). Despite evidence for weaving (Jolie, Lynch, Geib, & Adovasio,

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2011), pottery (Wu et al., 2012), and metalwork (Bebber, Buchanan, & Holland-
Lulewicz, 2022; Bebber & Key, 2022) having been developed and used by
the world’s foragers between 10-20 kya, the other criteria are cultural clusters
consistent with standard models; moralistic high gods are associated with state
societies and state societies are associated with the intensive exploitation of
large dairy animals.
Again, by virtue of the clutch of zeroes nested in societies with no levels
of jurisdictional hierarchy, one should find an association with moralistic high
gods and variables associated with social complexity. As it turns out, more
recent analyses (Lightner et al., 2023) show on statistical grounds that whatever
relationship exists isn’t strong; the probability of any society having a moralistic
high god is neither high nor above chance.
Stark assesses the latter two hypotheses using cross-national data collected
among individuals. To assess his latter-most hypothesis, Stark used the World
Values Survey, a popularly used data set collected from individuals in, at the
time, 33 different countries. Individual-level data is especially useful as it allows
us to make better inferences about people rather than populations. Stark used
three questions that indicated individuals’ moral permissiveness and rigidity,
not necessarily “individual morality.” These “moral” questions were about theft,
damaging someone else’s car and not reporting it, and smoking pot. Answers
were on a scale from 1 (never justified) to 10 (always justified). Curiously, Stark
selected these questions on the basis of their relative lack of variation and low
levels of acceptability (how Stark specifically reached this conclusion is unclear).
In other words, anyone who deviates from this consensus by suggesting such
behaviours are more often justified might be outliers for deeper reasons (e.g.,
age, criminal record, income, etc.). To measure religiosity, Stark used the
survey’s questions about how important God is in individuals’ lives, also on a
scale of 1 to 10 (“not at all” to “very important” respectively), and how often
individuals report “church attendance” (8 - “more than once a week” to 1 -
“never, or practically never”).
How Stark determined religious types (e.g., “contingent on images of gods
as conscious, morally-concerned beings [or] impersonal or unmoral gods”) is
curious. To examine these “images of gods,” he didn’t measure them. Rather, he
leans on his assumptions about the regions’ dominant traditions. For instance,
he clustered countries in the “Western Hemisphere” together because “they
share a general conception of God as an active, divine being who imposes
moral standards” (624). In contrast, countries in Eastern Europe stress “rite
and ritual, icons and incense, and [have] remarkably little to say about sin.”
In Japan, Buddhism and Shinto traditions allegedly have gods that are not
associated with morality (cf. Purzycki & Holland, 2019). Needless to say, he

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finds little correlation between religiosity and “individual morality” (i.e., moral
permissiveness) in these countries.
But this work suggests that the more individuals claim to adhere to religious
beliefs and practices, the more absolutist they are in their moral stance. It
does not, however, predict their moral conduct, nor does it link moral content
of traditions with actual behaviour more generally. Further, we run the risk
of committing the fallacy of division if we generalize group-level properties
(e.g., “Buddhist Japan”) to individuals. In Stark’s studies, countries or factors
of countries were never formally assessed as predictors of moral flexibility.
Rather, his explanations of correlations (or lack thereof) were appeals to his own
intuition about these places. Thus, his conclusion that “rites and rituals have little
or no impact on the major effect universally attributed to religion–conformity to
the moral order” (634) was simply not demonstrated in his study. We’ll revisit
the use of cross-cultural data sets of group-level phenomena in Section 7.3.
In summary, quantitative cross-cultural databases arose as a response to a
need for tools to examine global patterns of cultural variation. This resource
was specifically developed to address questions of religious variation, and it
found that supernatural involvement in moral affairs was commonplace in the
ethnographic world. Subsequent, more expansive databases primarily limited
their focus to high gods, of which many studies had taken advantage, finding
again and again a positive association between social complexity and high gods
that were “specifically supportive of human morality.”. Despite this narrow
focus on high gods, its troubling coding scheme, at least some dubious source
material, the repeated exploitation of these cross-cultural databases eclipsed
generations of dedicated inquiry.
Many of the later group-level reports using cross-cultural databases came
out at a time of increased interest in the evolutionary psychological foundations
of religion. Rather than focusing on coarse, group-level phenomena coded
from various texts, evolutionary research emphasised individual cognition and
behaviour in experimental and field contexts. As we’ll see, this new focus also
generated new and more precise ways of thinking about and measuring the
relationship between morality and the gods.

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5 Cognition and Religion12
5.1 Genesis of New Fields
5.1.1 Cognitive science
While the division has existed in various guises for centuries, in the 1980s and
90s, some sectors of the social sciences witnessed a widening gulf between those
who embraced various forms of nativism (i.e., a position that emphasizes innate
cognitive systems) and those who emphasized cultural learning as the ultimate
explanation for human behaviour. Drawing from the ideas of linguist Noam
Chomsky and philosopher Jerry Fodor, who pointed to innate cognitive systems
to account for much of human thought and language, many social scientists
began to propose a wide range of inborn cognitive mechanisms underlying
other domains of culture. Much of this literature alludes to what is called the
“poverty of the stimulus argument” which points to just how much isn’t taught
that children nevertheless express (Chomsky, 1965). For example, children
don’t have to be taught what language is or that objects fall when they reach
the edge of a table or that solid objects can’t pass through each other. Rather,
they infer what language is, they infer that an object will fall, and they infer that
solid objects will collide. Similarly, the grammar of a language emerges from
deeper structures and knowledge of syntax that the child already has. According
to some views, such inferences are made possible by virtue of innate cognitive
systems.
Some theories specified particular features that defined these cognitive
systems. Sometimes referred to as cognitive “modules,” these mental instincts
were thought to be innate, handle a narrow range of inputs, and relatively
automatic in their functioning (Fodor, 1983). Some held that the mind was
only minimally modular in this sense, where modules were restricted to perhaps
emotional responses, the perception of optical illusions, and some aspects of
human language. Others took this view further and, in relaxing some of the
criteria for what counts as a “module,” suggested that the mind is replete with
modular structures that underlie a wide range of human traits (e.g., Pinker, 1997;
Sperber, 1996).
12This section draws from Purzycki, Pisor, et al. (2018) and Purzycki and Willard (2016).

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5.1.2 Evolutionary psychology
Alongside a well-organized critique of the “standard social science model”–
the view that most human behaviour is socially learned and that the mind is
effectively an all-purpose tabula rasa (i.e., blank slate)–researchers deduced
the presence of a wide range of modules, including those dedicated to numbers,
music, spatial cognition, and many others (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1995;
Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994; Premack & Premack, 2003). Some took this view
even further and theorised that many such mechanisms evolved by way of natural
selection; these modules were advantageous for our ancestors to have and this
explains their universality and often context-specific functioning. Among others,
these commitments were core to the nascent state of “evolutionary psychology.”
This field heavily influenced major theories of culture as well. In one
approach, culture was made possible–and more likely to be a part of a group’s
repertoire–because of these evolved cognitive structures. With the suggestion
that evolved cognition functioned to generate intuitive inferences about our
world and these mechanisms have the capacity to attract corresponding cultural
information, theory increasingly minimized the significance of culture and
trial-and-error in accounting for human thought and behaviour.
Some drew from this increased interest in instinctive cognition to develop
models of human cognition. Popular “dual-process” models of human cognition
made the distinction between “fast” intuitive cognition on the one hand, and
“slow,” more deliberate reasoning on the other (see Kahneman, 2003). Building
on this, other models made the distinction between intuitive and reflective beliefs
(see Sperber, 1996, 1997). Here, “beliefs” refer to any general mental idea or
inference about our world that one might hold to be at least partly true. Roughly
speaking, intuitive beliefs are rapidly produced and the source of or process
behind producing such beliefs is not a part of one’s experience of the belief. For
example, we might quickly infer that because the ground is wet and the sky is
dark and cloudy, it has recently rained. We are not likely aware of the process
behind that inference (e.g., logic, the structure of the syllogism of the inference,
the recall of previous experience, etc.).
Intuitive beliefs are often conflated with beliefs that emerge from evolved
cognition. As philosopher Dan Sperber (1996) notes: “Intuitive beliefs owe
their rationality to essentially innate, hence universal, perceptual and inferential
mechanisms; as a result, they do not vary dramatically, and are essentially
mutually consistent or reconcilable across cultures” (91-92). Reflective beliefs,
on the other hand, are more effortful and the process by which we arrive at
them is very much a deliberate, conscious process. So, dividing 600 by 12.98
requires some effort and the means we arrive at our belief in the answer is the

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process of division. Thinking through one’s top 10 favourite songs takes some
reflection as the reasons why certain songs appear is a conscious part of the
process. Of course, there is an intuitive-reflective continuum and one person’s
reflective beliefs might be perfectly intuitive for someone else. As we’ll see,
the cognitive science of religion crystallized these ideas and applied them in
various ways to religious phenomena.
5.1.3 Cognitive science of religion
The cognitive science of religion grew directly out of evolutionary psychology.
While no one suggested we have a “religion” or “god” module, many argued
that the cognitive foundations of religion stemmed from evolved and/or innate
cognitive systems. Much of the early thinking in the cognitive science of
religion endorsed the view that religious phenomena were largely by-products
of our evolved minds (Atran, 2004; Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 2007). Linguist Steven
Pinker sums up this view nicely: “[humans] enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but
not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles
of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats
and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water” (Pinker, 1997,
524-525). In other words, humans have things like religion, music, and art
because they have elements of things that had past value that we evolved to
appreciate, but they remain attractive because they trigger these ancestral traits.
Such things are found everywhere because of their intuitive appeal. This view
treats cultural information like an epidemic; cultural things like music and
literature spread like diseases because our innate cognition attracts them.
In the context of religion, these cognitive systems provide intuitive information
that attracts beliefs and practices. For example, some examine whether intuitive
mind-body dualism underlies beliefs in spirits (Chudek, McNamara, Birch,
Bloom, & Henrich, 2018). Others treat ritual as having its own “grammar” with
corresponding cognitive foundations (Lawson & McCauley, 1993) while others
argue that the punctiliousness we so often exhibit with ritual stems from evolved
“hazard precaution systems” (Liénard & Boyer, 2006). Researchers have pointed
to a variety of other cognitive foundations of religion, all united in suggesting
that the curious elements associated with religion we find around the world
emerge from the way our minds naturally work (C. White, 2021).
One important set of religious beliefs come from our ability to infer that
other beings have mental states–beliefs, desires, and perceptions. While other
species likely have this ability to some degree, humans’ mentalising abilities are
notably complex and nuanced (Call & Tomasello, 2008; D. C. Penn & Povinelli,

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2007). This “mindreading system” consists of a variety of sub-mechanisms
ostensibly shaped by natural selection that animate the entities of our world
with mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1997). One particularly influential idea is that
among the central cognitive foundations of religion are our anthropomorphic or
“mentalising” tendencies; we are so good at detecting mental states and granting
non-humans the ability to symbolically communicate.
In this view, religious cognition is this trait in action. Building upon centuries
of thought, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie (1980; 1995) argued that our rapid
perceptual biases toward detecting other minds accounts for our religiosity. In
doing so, Guthrie grounded elements of Tylor’s theory of animism in human
cognition (cf. Guthrie, 2000). Guthrie added an evolutionary spin to his
argument, suggesting that our ancestors–and other animals more generally–
survived in the past because it was always better to detect another agent’s threat
when there wasn’t one (i.e., a false positive) than it was to not detect a threat
when there was one (i.e., a false negative). Individuals were more likely to
survive when they erred on the side of caution. As such, it is effortless for us to
find minds in the natural world. Psychologist Justin Barrett (2004) pursued this
idea, postulating the presence of a “hyperactive agency detection” system that
detected minds with just a few of the right kinds of inputs. This device makes
conveying the idea of a spirit or god–an anthropomorphic mind with unique
properties–especially easy to learn and internalize. In order to believe that gods
or spirits care about us, we must be able to infer that they have minds in the first
place. Such inferences are fast, intuitive, and come to us naturally.
What about reflective and/or cultural beliefs? Surely religious beliefs and
practices are more than what come naturally to our minds. The specifics of
some beliefs are obviously cultural; from the Crucifixion to sacred garden
groves, many central beliefs are culturally transmitted across the generations.
Yet, some are bafflingly complicated and require generations of theologians
to offer solutions. The indivisibility of the Trinity and the Problem of Evil,
for example, are non-trivial problems on which theologians have expended
considerable effort. Some of the founders of the cognitive science of religion
point to a distinction between reflective and intuitive beliefs as useful to account
for kinds of religious thought and practice, suggesting that much of it stems
from our intuitions (Slone, 2007). We might have long, drawn out theological
discussions about the nature of spirits and the universe, and these are deliberate
reflective thoughts. However, the idea that a god knows things or the inference
that a drum makes a louder sound when hit harder are both perfectly intuitive
thoughts. What’s interesting about religious cognition is that sometimes our
intuitions are inconsistent with our reflections; our own minds often get in the
way of what we’re supposed to believe about the minds of gods.

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One set of experiments (Barrett & Keil, 2016) showed that even though
individuals claim that the Christian god knows and perceives everything, after
reading a passage that describes some event, participants readily limit his ability
as though he were a human. For example, participants read one scenario where
God is admiring a colourful rock, but then a stampede runs by and covers it
with dust. When recalling the story, individuals–who claim God perceives
everything–suggest that God’s vision of the rock was obscured by the dust.
What this inconsistency suggests is that people are using their intuitive beliefs
about people–beings with limited perceptual abilities–to quickly make sense
of a scenario even though they claim that the agent involved in omniscient; an
all-knowing entity should still be able to see and appreciate the stone after it was
covered with dust. Had individuals been using their more abstract theological
statements when perceiving the story, they would have said as much. As
we’ll see, this interplay between explicit religious beliefs and how individuals
intuitively think in real-time plays a role in making sense of the relationship
between morality and the gods. In order to appreciate these developments, we
need to first briefly review the evolutionary psychology of morality.
5.2 Cognitive Foundations of Religion and Morality
5.2.1 Evolutionary psychology of morality
As we’ve already seen hints of, the subject of morality has had a long and
diverse history (Malle & Robbins, 2025). As in any other field striving to
understand elusive, multifaceted theoretical constructs, various researchers tend
to emphasize different things. In keeping with philosopher Immanuel Kant’s
(1997 [1785]) categorical imperative, some appeal to universal applicability;
morality involves prescriptive behaviours that are applicable to everyone at all
times (Caton, 1963). Such views attend to the scope of moral relevance. Others
focus on the content of what counts as “moral.” For example, developmental
psychologist Eliot Turiel (1983, 2006) famously considers morality as things
concerning “justice, rights, and welfare.” However, the content and scope of
what counts as moral is known to vary cross-culturally, and groups often lack
abstract notions like “justice” and “rights,” or don’t specify or limit whom and
to what situations moral prescriptions apply (Fessler et al., 2015; Purzycki,
Pisor, et al., 2018; Schwartz, 2007; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park,
1997). Indeed, the difficulty in precisely delimiting what constitutes morality
is only exacerbated by Western-centric approaches to the topic. As cultural
and evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm (1980) mused, “when the

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subject is morality, possibilities for ethnocentric, personal, and theoretical biases
of the ethnographer to distort indigenous ‘psychological realities’ are maximal”
(3). However, there does appear to be an emerging consensus in the field.
Part of that consensus lies in the relationship between our mentalising abilities
and their relevance to morality. Many have examined the strong psychological
link between mind perception and moral cognition (K. Gray & Wegner, 2011;
K. Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012; Imuta, Henry, Slaughter, Selcuk, & Ruffman,
2016; Young & Phillips, 2011; Young & Saxe, 2011). In particular, perspective-
taking is essential to engage in “good” behaviour and avoid “bad” behaviour;
this kind of empathising is necessary for strong, stable relationships. So, when
we use our mentalising abilities, we engage or moral sensibilities by default.
Another part of that consensus lies in morality’s function. Though diverse
(e.g., Cronk, 1994; Curry, 2016; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Machery & Mallon,
2010), evolutionary accounts of morality have long considered the psychology
underlying beliefs and behaviours that approximate the “moral,” with the premise
that these beliefs and behaviours generate individual- and/or group-level benefits.
In a statement that presaged the aforementioned distinction between evolved
capacities, social learning, and reason, Charles Darwin (1871) focused on
the relationship between “social instincts” in humans and the ontogeny (i.e.,
individual development) of reciprocity, suggesting that “the social instincts...with
the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the
golden rule...and this lies at the foundation of morality” (151). Here, Darwin
elegantly ties together biology, acculturation, and models of how to treat others.
Building on this general framing, biologist Richard Alexander (1987) suggests
that “immoral is a label we apply to...acts by which we help ourselves or hurt
others, while acts that hurt ourselves or help others are more likely to be judged
moral than immoral,” noting that “it is not easy to be more precise in defining”
the domain (12). In sum, these views suggest that the content of morality
boils down to how we treat others, and the scope of morality pertains to how
individuals treat other individuals.
Evolutionary psychological approaches to morality build upon this general
framework, but also have their own idiosyncratic conceptions of the content
and scope of the moral domain (see Cosmides & Tooby, 2005). For example,
while some emphasise psychological adaptations that mitigate problems in
cooperation and coordination (Greene, 2013), others offer broader purviews of
“moral systems” defined as “interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices,
identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that
work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperative social
life possible” (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010, 800). Of course, many evolutionary
thinkers emphasize morality’s function in promoting cooperation. For instance,

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Tomasello and Vaish (2013) argue that morality’s “main function...is to regulate
an individual’s social interactions with others in the general direction of
cooperation, given that all individuals are at least somewhat selfish” (232).
Despite diversity in conceptualisations, evolutionary psychological approaches
agree that human reciprocity and cooperation are a manifestation of morality’s
evolutionary heritage. A considerable bulk of the remaining efforts revolve
around problems pertaining to the content and scope of evolved morality.13
One content problem largely consists of what the evolved domains of morality
actually are (for review, see K. Gray & Pratt, 2025). Take, for example, the
popular “Moral Foundations” literature. Seeking to better operationalise the
moral domain with attention to cross-cultural validity, this work breaks down the
evolutionary psychological “foundations” of morality into a few core dimensions
(i.e., dedicated and distinct cognitive systems that handle specific aspects of
morality). While the rubric itself has evolved (Graham et al., 2013), the
most recent iteration includes: (1) harm/care; (2) fairness/reciprocity; (3)
ingroup/loyalty; (4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity as foundational
to moral reasoning. In contrast, the more recent “Morality-as-Cooperation”
literature (Curry, 2016; Curry, Chesters, & Van Lissa, 2019) measures seven
types of cooperation treated as the foundations of moral behaviour: (1) family
values; (2) group loyalty; (3) reciprocity; (4) dominance; (5) deference; (6)
fairness; and (7) rights to property. These categories reflect sub-domains of
moral reasoning and the salient values that people might hold cross-culturally.
Both approaches adopt the stance that moral systems are fundamentally about
cooperation. Evidence from coded cross-cultural materials shows that around
the world, people certainly treat aspects of cooperation as “good” (Curry,
Mullins, & Whitehouse, 2019). Yet, when individuals list what it means to
be good and bad, it can be difficult to classify the things they list using these
rubrics (e.g., is “honesty” about fairness or deference? is “kindness” about
group loyalty or reciprocity?, see Purzycki, Pisor, et al., 2018). Nevertheless,
such items are easily nestled in the greater context of cooperation.
So far, we’ve pointed to the evolutionary psychological literature that in-
vestigates the purported biological foundations of the moral domain. While
varying, the literature addressing the content problem of the moral domain
13
An important point to make here is that we should be careful not to conflate “cooperation” with
“good” or “selfishness” with “bad.” While such theories closely align cooperation with morality,
they do not suggest that religion (or any other mechanism) makes us “good”; they mean that they
induce cooperative behaviour. Of course, thugs and criminals can cooperate with each other, yet we
wouldn’t associate that with the “good.” Depending on one’s perspective, it can look good, but
that’s a normative judgement. What people do with the cooperation that they’ve achieved is another
matter.

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ultimately addresses what individuals and communities think are (in)appropriate
behaviours directed towards other people. We’ll revisit the scope problem later.
For now, let’s bring the evolutionary psychology of morality to bear on the
cognitive science of religion.
5.2.2 Cognitive science of morality and the gods
Two influential ideas that came out of the cognitive science of religion that
are immediately pertinent to understanding the relationship between morality
and the gods. One is that religious ideas’ content contains elements that either
directly violate default, modular inferences associated with certain classes of
information (e.g., as they can walk through walls, a ghost is just a person
that violates intuitive physics) or apply default inferences of some categories
to objects in other categories (e.g., a rattle that knows where lost objects are
applies mental abilities to an artefact) (Boyer & Ramble, 2001). Such ideas
are the objects of our fascination, and because our attention fixates on their
unusualness, these ideas are easier to remember. Because of their mnemonic
advantage, these ideas are more likely to proliferate through a population (Atran,
2004; Boyer, 2007). Yet, there are many ideas that have such counter-intuitive
content, but aren’t the targets of religious devotion. Why doesn’t anyone pray to
cartoon characters who regularly defy physics, cheat death, and have access to
knowledge beyond their natural counterparts (see Swan & Halberstadt, 2019)?
This question leads us to the second influential idea: unlike spirits and
gods, other counter-intuitive agents aren’t endowed with “socially strategic
information,” a domain of useful information about other people (Boyer, 2000).
It’s good to know if others are honest or deceitful. It’s helpful to know if
someone will always be there when you need help or instead typically prioritize
themselves. It’s also useful to know if someone spends a little too much time
in the bunker they built in their back yard. As a domain associated with
cooperation, we might think of “morality” as a subset of all possible socially
strategic information. According to this view, this is why we don’t pray to
cartoon characters: because we don’t infer that their moral interest is directed
toward us.
In theory, gods are perceived minds, and minds are by default treated as
moral agents. Because we talk about gods being concerned about what we
do, it comes naturally that we infer they care about how we treat each other
too. If that’s the case, then a few hypotheses follow. First, beliefs of morally
interested, counter-intuitive agents should be more memorable than mundane

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38 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
agents with or without access to socially strategic interest.
14
Second, if gods
are perceived as minds and minds are by default treated as moral agents, it
follows that we should intuit that they are concerned with moral behaviour.
Third, people should exhibit a bias toward treating gods as moral agents even
when their traditions don’t explicitly and reflectively hold that gods and spirits
care about morality. We still might intuit that gods know and care about human
moral behaviour by virtue of mind perception’s relationship to moral cognition
and our conduct. Fourth, if people perceive knowledgeable gods and spirits
as especially attuned to moral information by virtue of default inferences, it
should be easier to process an association between gods and god-like beings
and socially strategic information. Using various methods, a few studies show
how important this intuitive association actually is.
One study examined the relationship between prayer and sociality at the
neurological level (Schjoedt, Stødkilde-Jørgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2009).
Using fMRI, the researchers assessed which parts of the brain were most engaged
across Christian participants’ recitation of The Lord’s Prayer, a nursery rhyme,
making personalized prayers to God, and listing wishes to Santa Claus. They
found that the anterior medial prefrontal cortex–a region associated with social
cognition–was the most engaged when praying to God. In other words, the brain
treats interacting with deities as a social experience. If the brain treats prayer as
a social act, would it also generate the inferences that the deities we pray to are
moral agents?
Other research examined just how intuitive associating agents with knowledge
and concern of moral information is for people. One set of experiments (Purzycki
et al., 2012) measured participants’ response times about what various beings
knew. These beings included God, Santa Claus, an omniscient police state,
and a non-interfering hyper-knowledgeable alien species. Each participant only
answered questions about one of these agents (i.e., it was a between-subjects
design). Questions ranged from moral questions both positive (e.g., “Does
know that Ann gives to the homeless?”) and negative (e.g., “Does
know that Jane has stolen a car?”) and a variety of non-moral questions
(e.g., “Does know how fast Joey’s heart beats?”). Participants answered
questions on a computer as quickly as they could and the computer recorded how
fast they answered the questions. Across these agents–all of which were treated
as knowing everything–participants were quicker to answer the moral questions,
with the negative questions typically the quickest. So, even though these
entities were omniscient, participants’ response-speeds were biased toward their
14
Of course, other factors such as frequency of exposure, emotional salience, the source (i.e.,
who says it) matters in the retention and transmission of ideas. This view doesn’t deny this, but
argues that this particular set of factors appear to be the foundations of religious beliefs.

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knowledge of moral, socially strategic information. This suggests an important
inconsistency between culturally “correct” views and how the religious mind
works in real-time. But it also suggests an especially strong connection between
moral domains and what gods and god-like entities know.
Recall the debates about whether the gods of traditional populations were
associated with morality. All of the aforementioned cognitive studies relied
on Western samples most commonly associated with Christianity. How would
such studies look in other populations? Would we find similar results among
individuals whose explicit beliefs pointed to things other than morality? These
questions led to a group of projects conducted in the Tyva Republic, a small
southern Siberian province of Russia, just north of Mongolia. Traditional Tyvan
religion is associated with local spirit-masters (cher eeleri). These spirits are
totemic, locally-bound spirits that have their own territories and/or lord over
particular resources (Purzycki, 2013b). A few studies (Purzycki, 2011, 2013a)
show that when asked to freely list the kinds of things that anger and please
cher eeleri, Tyvans predominantly list sullying and over-exploiting nature as
the primary source of spirits’ anger and ritual practices as the primary source
of their pleasure. Tyvans clearly associate these spirits with specific human
behaviours.
Yet, when directly asked how much spirits know and care about moral
information, Tyvans were consistently more likely to positively affirm that
spirits knew and cared about moral behaviour than they were to non-moral
information. Interestingly, these spirits’ knowledge and concern were mediated
by where a moral behaviour took place; spirits were less knowledgeable and
concerned about behaviours that transpired far away from their territories than
those that occur within them. Yet, Tyvans treated them as very knowledgeable
and concerned with moral behaviours that transpired on their territory. Notably,
on average, Tyvans reported that spirits know and care more about human moral
behaviours in distant places than non-moral information that was knowable
anywhere. This suggests that even though Tyvans explicitly and reflectively
associate spirits with ritual and resource use, they still intuitively associate the
same spirits with morality, particularly moral conduct in their vicinity. Put
differently, when asked directly, Tyvans will explicitly think of spirits as very
much “specifically supportive of human morality.”
As it turns out, Tyvans do not readily list the preservation of nature or ritual
participation as things that mark “good” or “bad” people (Purzycki, 2016). This
suggests that the gods’ concerns are not so closely related to Tyvans’ explicit
models of morality. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that Tyvans would deny that
preserving resources or paying your respects to spirits are “good” things if
directly asked. In sum, this work suggests that spiritual agents and morality are

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at the very least intuitively associated, even if their most widely-understood and
culturally explicit concerns are about other things. Framing one of Swanson’s
hypotheses in the form of a question about individual psychology and behaviour,
then: why would anyone come to associate gods with moral concern when they
normally don’t? In other words, if it’s not standard cultural fare, how do people
come to express this connection?
5.2.3 Gods’ moral associations made manifest
We can delineate a few candidate processes behind the observed association
between gods and morality. One possibility follows from the idea that gods are
treated as moral minds. If another anthropomorphic mind is interested in some
aspect of our lives (e.g., ritual or exploiting resources), we might infer that they
are concerned with how we treat others without much effort. This possibility is
not so far-fetched; people might not ever think of Santa Claus as having earwax,
but we can infer that he does based on the idea that he has ears and is more or
less human-like. This moral minds hypothesis suggests that when confronted
with such questions, we reason about the gods just as we do about most other
interested parties (see above) so it appears effortless to explicitly associate
gods with moral concern, even if we might not normally talk about them that
way (i.e., they aren’t culturally widespread). We’re often quick to associate
misfortune with some moral failing of our ours (or the immoral intentions of
others), often with appeals to gods (Boyer, 2022; K. Gray & Wegner, 2010).
Common sense also suggests that when we interact with new people, we don’t
need to be explicitly told that they don’t want us to hurt or steal from them.
Rather, we draw from generalisations we’ve cultivated throughout our lives.
Another hypothesis is the supernatural monitoring hypothesis. This line of
work addresses how the perception of being watched alters behaviour that could
be construed as “moral.” While the evidence is mixed and such experiments
do not consistently tap into the obvious fact that we adjust our behaviour if we
feel like we’re being watched (see Northover, Pedersen, Cohen, & Andrews,
2017), a batch of research has examined how artificial indices of agency (e.g.,
two eyes on a computer screen, a human-like statue) alter honest or generous
behaviours (Krátk
`
y, McGraw, Xygalatas, Mitkidis, & Reddish, 2016; Nettle et
al., 2013). One study (Piazza, Bering, & Ingram, 2011) of particular relevance
to religion used children as participants. The children played a game where they
were supposed to hit a target by throwing a ball. In this virtually impossible
task, they had to play while facing away from the target. They also played alone.
Half of the children were assigned this control condition. Those assigned to

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the treatment condition did the same task, but were initially told that a spirit
inhabited the lab. The children who were told about the spirit were less likely
to cheat in the task than those in the control condition. This suggests that
we might intuitively associate being watched with moral interest; even though
this spirit was not described as caring, these children were nevertheless more
cautious about breaking the rules after entertaining that possibility (see too
Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005). In such cases, spirits’ moral relevance
is made explicit behaviourally.
Recall Evans-Pritchard’s characterisation of the reflexive, “condescending”
position that any moral content of small-scale societies’ gods must have come
from an outside influence. To the extent that the specific qualities of beliefs are
transferable across gods, we might appeal to the cultural inference hypothesis.
Here, individuals might attribute moral concern to some gods based on what
they know about other gods (indigenous or otherwise). Could it be that Tyvans
associate moral concern with spirits because they also believe that the Buddha
cares about (and sanctions) human morality (Purzycki & Holland, 2019)? Tyvans
are certainly aware of other belief systems too (e.g., Christianity and Islam),
so it is possible that they are making inferences based on their knowledge of
other more explicitly moralistic traditions. This view implies that the human
mind might allow such conceptual bleeding by using specific rules and deeper
categories; it’s as though it reasons: “if it’s a spirit, then attribute moral concern
to it because this other spirit cares about morality.” It’s plausible, but the process
is unclear. Furthermore, this particular possibility does not account for why
some traits are transferred across gods while others aren’t. Why would one
god’s explicit moral interest be applied to another god when their attributed
stories, appearances, and other traits are kept distinct?
Another hypothesis might be called the projection hypothesis, or the idea
that because we are interested in morality, we project this interest to the gods
(see Jackson & Gray, 2023). Some might hold that because we can usually
query real human minds but since we can’t query gods’, we are likely to draw
more upon our own attitudes and desires when reasoning about what gods want.
One study (Epley, Converse, Delbosc, Monteleone, & Cacioppo, 2009) shows
that with issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action policies,
and the death penalty, Americans are more likely to align God’s views with
their own (over Bill Gates’, George Bush’s, and the average American’s). It’s
obvious that such political attitudes are closely aligned with religious values
in the American context. Would we find similar patterns in other contexts?
Would Tyvan spirit-masters be more likely to care about the death penalty when
individuals care about it? How far does this projection extend? Are we more
likely to infer that God also has the same tastes in music and art? If so, how

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42 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
does this affect behaviour?
Recall Swanson’s hypothesis about the development of the explicit association
between morality and the gods. He predicted that under an acute threat of moral
instability, the relationship between morality and the gods will become explicit.
This particular hypothesis–call it the cooperative threat hypothesis–suggests
that the content of gods’ concerns emerge in response to socially uncertain
contexts as a means to influence others’ behaviour (see Fitouchi & Singh,
2022; Fitouchi, Singh, André, & Baumard, n.d.). That is, to influence others,
one must explicitly convey appeals. To assess the possibility that religious
appeals can shift according to specific threats, one study (Purzycki, Stagnaro, &
Sasaki, 2020) had Christian participants play a “trust game.” In this experiment,
participants are given some money and make a decision about whether to give it
to someone else. That money is then multiplied by some factor. The recipient
then makes the decision about whether to split or keep the greater sum. It’s
called a “Trust Game” because the initial giver has to invest some trust in the
recipient in order to get a bigger payoff. In this particular experiment, Christian
givers were more likely to claim that God is angered by “greed” after not getting
a return. This is consistent with the cooperative threat hypothesis; the content
of a god’s concerns might be partially a response to such conditions, at least
temporarily. How long such an effect would last is unknown. Further, “greed”
likely falls within the general category of “morality.” Would we see the same
effect in contexts where people generally associate their spirits with other things
like ritual and resources?
These hypotheses are neither exhaustive of the possibilities nor necessarily in
competition with each other and mutually exclusive. Like the cooperative threat
hypothesis, some of these possibilities might be more relevant in some contexts
than others. As they tend to focus on specific, pan-human cognitive processes,
theory in the cognitive science of religion has largely ignored variation across
contexts (see Bendixen & Purzycki, 2020, 2021). Below, we’ll revisit this
question of context more directly (see Section 7.4.2).
To summarize, if we restrict our investigation to the level of human cognition,
the relationship between morality and the gods might be characterized as follows.
By treating morality as a normative system that regulates the costs and benefits
of social life, we can situate the study of religious morality across biology,
culture, and individual agency. Rooted in human psychology, morality and
moral systems are a part of our biological heritage; as a social species, we
enter the world with a considerable amount of information, particularly about
expectations of how to treat others, and enculturation and reason also play a
role in providing moral frameworks and scripts for moral actions. As such,
that thing we call “morality” is a convoluted mix of intuitive biology, culture,

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and deliberate, reflective reasoning. Part of our biological heritage is also the
propensity to perceive minds, and importantly, there appears to be a steadfast
connection between perceiving minds and the engagement of psychological
systems associated with moral reasoning. As gods are effectively treated as
minds, we in turn treat them by default as minds with moral interests and
knowledge. In other words, due to the way our minds work, the relationship
between morality and the gods should be widespread, a prediction that grounds
generations of anthropological observation and sentiment in human cognition.
What of religious practices? The work reviewed in this chapter focuses on
religious and moral beliefs. Yet, there is a wide range of activities that people
perform that are devoted to the gods. How might they relate to morality? Far
from treating practices as “cognitive cheesecake,” the evolutionary study of
religious behaviour developed the view we saw expressed earlier by Durkheim
and Malinowski, namely, that to the extent that it helps to hold societies together,
religious behaviour is inextricably linked to morality.
6 The Evolution of Religious Behaviour15
Generations of evolutionary anthropologists have endorsed the view that our
capacity for culture has allowed human beings to dwell in every habitable place
on the planet (Binford, 1962; Richerson & Boyd, 2008). From cultural traditions
from house-building and hunting technologies to clothing and medicine, our
ability to transmit knowledge across the generations has allowed us to adapt to
just about any environment. A corollary of this view is that part of the variation
we see in cultural traditions stems from the kinds of problems they solve. In
addition to making life possible in the natural world, some cultural traits can
also address, create, and exacerbate problems in our social worlds.
What’s especially interesting about humans is that we have relied on each
other for a considerable amount of our evolutionary history. We’re not only
social, but our interdependence has contributed to our survival in critical ways.
If our ability to survive and reproduce is contingent on others, it’s especially
important that we work together. As such, aspects of human culture likely play
a critical role in overcoming threats to our social lives. Updating the cultural
functionalism of Durkheim and Malinowski, evolutionary functionalists hold
that some aspects of culture ensured human success through a confluence of
natural and cultural selection (see Shariff, Purzycki, & Sosis, 2014). That is,
some cultural traits and their variants were preserved because they contributed to
15
This section draws from Purzycki and Bendixen (2025), Lightner and Purzycki (2023) and
Purzycki, Bendixen, Lightner, and Sosis (2022).

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44 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
human reproduction and survival in particular conditions. To some extent, then,
these benefits would thus reinforce their continued transmission throughout the
generations. Is religion one such adaptive technology?
In contrast to treating religion as just long, trans-generational strings of
culturally learned information or an attractive by-product of our evolved psy-
chology, a burgeoning evolutionary science suggests that religion has been and
may continue to be predominantly adaptive; in a variety of ways, religious
beliefs and practices contribute to human survival and reproduction (Alcorta
& Sosis, 2005; Bulbulia et al., 2008; Purzycki & Sosis, 2022; Shaver et al.,
2020; Shaver, Sibley, Sosis, Galbraith, & Bulbulia, 2019; Slone & Van Slyke,
2016; Sosis, 2009; Voland & Schiefenhövel, 2009; Wilson, 2019). As the
next couple of sections review, the majority of adaptive arguments suggest that
religious behaviours and beliefs contribute to the kind of cooperation that has
been crucial for human success around the world. In order to further bridge
the relationship between morality, cooperation, and religion, we’ll first dig into
the problem of cooperation and why humans are thought to be so unique in the
biological world. We’ll then examine the various ways in which researchers
have investigated religious behaviour and how that has contributed to resolving
the kinds of problems that hinder moral relationships. As we’ll see, these moral
relationships are shaped by the way we make a living.
6.1 Evolutionary Theory and Social Life
While there are myriad forms of cross-species mutualism (Kropotkin, 1998
[1902]), one of the remarkable things about humans is that we are uniquely
social and, compared to non-human animals, strikingly generous with each
other. When it comes to investing in other individuals, most organisms tend
to prioritize those most closely related to them (Hamilton, 1964). Yet, most
animals don’t invest much in others beyond kin; there’s very little reciprocity
exhibited by non-human animals. Human animals, however, tend to develop
reciprocal relationships where non-related individuals will help each other out
when needed and reciprocate in kind (Trivers, 1971). But human sociality also
goes far beyond such reciprocal relationships; we regularly give considerable
resources to anonymous others without ever expecting anything in return.
Coupled with the fact that humanity’s sociality has contributed to our survival
in unprecedented ways and contexts, humans are uniquely cooperative animals.
How is this possible? What role do the gods play in this process?
To get a better appreciation for the answers, let’s first examine the problem
of cooperation a little closer by using game theory. Evolutionary game theory

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(Maynard-Smith, 1982) models the evolution of competing strategies. Some
game theoretic models address particular social scenarios defined by the deci-
sions individuals make and their outcomes. These outcomes are in the form of
payoffs: the costs and benefits of social decisions. In such models, individuals’
payoffs are contingent on what other “players” do and how common they are in
the population. The bigger your payoff, the more evolutionarily successful you
are. Much of the evolutionary social sciences asks why anyone would cooperate
when being selfish yields a bigger immediate payoff. You can see this in the
following illustration.
Player 2
Player 1 𝐶 𝐷
𝐶 𝑏 −𝑐−𝑐
𝐷 𝑏 0
Table 4 Payoffs for Player 1 in Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Table 4 details the various payoffs of a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game. Let’s
say we’ve both done something bad and are taken to jail and thrown in separate
cells. The police are pressuring us to confess to our crimes. In this game, you
(Player 1) and I (Player 2) are playing against each other and payoffs in this
matrix are all your payoffs. In this context, think of them as sentences. Here,
𝑏
refers to “benefits” (i.e., a lighter sentence) and
𝑐
means cost (i.e., a harsher
sentence). Here, we assume that
𝑏 > 𝑏 −𝑐 > 0>−𝑐
. There are two strategies
from which to choose. You could cooperate (
𝐶
) with me by staying quiet or you
could defect (
𝐷
) by ratting me out. Now, if you choose
𝐶
, you can get one of
two payoffs,
𝑏−𝑐
or
−𝑐
, depending on what I choose. If I also cooperate, our
sentence is
𝑏−𝑐
, but if I defect, your sentence the harsher
−𝑐
. If you chose
𝐷
, you can either walk away with
𝑏
–the lightest sentence of all. No matter the
outcome, it’s always better to choose
𝐷
, or defect, because if you defect and I
cooperate, you get the benefit 𝑏, but if we both defect, we get nothing.
On a grander scale, it’s better for the collective if everyone cooperates. Let’s
say
𝑏=2
and
𝑐=1
. That means 100 cooperators interacting only with other
cooperators will get a total payoff of 100. An all-defector sample will get
nothing. On an individual level, however, it’s always better to defect; 100
defectors ratting out 100 cooperators have a total payoff of 200. Because of
their bigger individual payoffs, defectors will always win over cooperators. As
such, there’s always a looming temptation to defect. In evolutionary terms, this

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46 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
means defectors will eventually replace cooperators in a population.
Clearly this is not the world we live in. So, while the model nicely summarizes
the problem of cooperation, it’s a terrible representation of reality. Why, then,
do we engage in so much cooperation? Formal mathematical theory suggests
that cooperators will proliferate when they are more likely to interact with each
other and when the costs of defection are high (i.e., increase the value of 𝑐).
So, we need a mechanism or set of mechanisms to account for how we can
increase the chances that cooperators interact with each other and/or increase
the costs of defecting. Research points to a wide range of mechanisms that
bring (and keep) cooperators together. As already mentioned, kinship can play
an important role, but the ability to keep track of cooperators and defectors is
also a very important mechanism that promotes cooperation. How do we know
who is likely to cooperate and who is likely to defect? If religion contributes to
cooperation, it must consist of mechanisms that bring cooperators together (and
keep defectors out) and/or increase the costs–real or perceived–of selfishness.
The kinds of things that gods want are things that appear to do just this.
6.2 What Gods Want
What do gods want cross-culturally? We saw that there has been steadfast
interest in whether they’re “specifically supportive of human morality,” but
what about gods’ other concerns? Curiously, this essential question managed to
escape dedicated scrutiny for generations. Some early surveys are suggestive
of the kinds of variation that might exist out there, but few rigorous studies
exist at the level of individual beliefs. For example, Boehm (2008) surveyed
43 ethnographies about 18 different hunter-gatherer societies and coded the
kinds of things reported to be punished by the gods. Here, Boehm made the
distinction between 15 moral behaviours (e.g., incest, murder, theft, deceit)–
“antisocial” acts that are “predatory on fellow band members” (146, 148)–and
eight “nonmoral taboos” (e.g., food, ritual, and sex). As it turns out, all 18
societies had literature mentioning some form of moral behaviours condemned
by the gods, though no single act beyond “deviance in general” was reported
in more than half of the cases. Frequent “nonmoral taboos” discussed in the
ethnographies were food, ritual, animal, and sexual taboos (cf. J. S. Brown,
1952).
Surveying various ethnographic reports, Purzycki and McNamara (2016)
created a broader typology of gods’ concerns. At the most general, gods are
thought to care about (
𝑖
) things done toward other people, (
𝑖𝑖
) things done
toward them, and (
𝑖𝑖𝑖
) things done toward nature. More specifically, gods care

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about (
𝑖
) morality, etiquette, and virtue; (
𝑖𝑖
) belief and ritual; and (
𝑖𝑖𝑖
) resource
preservation and regulation. What do these concerns have in common? What
accounts for their differences?
Recent theory (Bendixen & Purzycki, 2020; Purzycki, Bendixen, et al., 2022)
suggests that the cross-cultural association between gods and the behaviours
they care point to a recurring suite of features (see too McNamara & Purzycki,
2020). Specifically, these “god problems” are costly social dilemmas that
are important to individuals and their communities but are difficult and/or
more expensive to regulate using secular means (e.g., police, social ostracism,
and other institutions). To assess these predictions, Bendixen et al. (2024)
used the aforementioned categories (e.g., morality, virtue, ritual, etc.) to code
data collected among over 500 individuals in eight different societies. This
study asked about two gods that were important in each society. One god was
pre-selected to be relatively more punitive, knowledgeable, and concerned with
morality (e.g., the Abrahamic god). One was locally salient, but relatively
less moralistic, punitive, and knowledgeable (“moralistic” and “local” gods,
respectively). Participants listed the kinds of things that angered the gods
and things that pleased them. Unsurprisingly, the “moralistic” gods were
considerably more concerned with items coded as “morality” and “virtue” than
the “local” gods. However, “local gods” were also consistently associated with
moral issues in addition to locally specific behaviours. Moreover, each of the
behaviours that people claimed their local gods cared about were associated
with pressing social dilemmas that were difficult to regulate exclusively with
secular means. This work suggests that much of the variation we see in religious
traditions around the world stems from the kinds of social dilemmas people
face in their communities. Furthermore, it suggests that religious behaviours
are intrinsically “moral.” If we go with contemporary views of morality as a
regulatory system of cooperation, if gods are widely concerned with behaviours
that regulate cooperation, then they are clearly “specifically supportive” of
practices that contribute to moral conduct. Consistent with Malinowski’s
sentiments (see Section 3.3), the behaviours that people claim gods care about
appear to come at individual costs in ways that benefit communities. That is,
the things that gods care about are the cooperative strategies in game theoretic
dilemmas. Let’s take a look at a few examples up close. Given the amount of
attention it has received, religious ritual offers the clearest example of gods’
concerns contributing to cooperation and the moral order.

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6.3 Costly Signalling Theory of Ritual
In his magnum opus, Ritual and the Making of Humanity, anthropologist
Roy Rappaport (1999) explicitly links the moral order with ritual practice.
Rappaport treats ritual as a mechanism that establishes and ultimately conveys
acceptance of and obligation to the moral order of one’s community. When
someone participates in public ritual, that individual conveys to others that he
or she accepts the greater tradition of which they are a part and the inherent
morality of doing so. Ritual participation “establishes an obligation to abide by
whatever conventions...that order represents. The force of acceptance is, thus,
moral, for breach of obligation...is the one element present in all unethical acts”
(1999: 395). Furthermore,
failure to abide by the terms of an obligation is universally stigmatized as
immoral. To the extent, then, that obligation is entailed by the acceptance
intrinsic to the performance of a liturgical order, ritual establishes morality
as it establishes convention. The establishment of a convention and the
establishment of it morality are inextricable, if they are not, in fact, one and
the same (Rappaport, 1999, 132).
Using “morality” as norms of obligation, Rappaport details how rituals convey
acceptance to tradition and their inherent moral value; by conveying solidarity to
the moral order that forges individuals into communities. By not participating,
one rejects the moral order, the greater tradition, and its constituents. As such,
ritual is central to maintaining the moral order.
Some ported these insights into evolutionary theory and argued that it is the
costs of rituals that render the message of acceptance reliable (Irons, 2001). To
illustrate, first consider the tendency of male birds to have more extravagant
plumage than females. It takes considerable energy to create magnificent and
brightly-coloured feathers and having such plumage also could draw the attention
of predators. Yet, females choose those males with the greatest plumage by
virtue of what Zahavi and Zahavi (1999) call the “handicap principle” (see
D. J. Penn & Számadó, 2020, for critical review). This principle states that
paying such costs is what reliably conveys a signal of quality; ideal mates
“handicap” themselves by producing and showing off apparently wasteful and
often risky traits in order to demonstrate just how good they are. It’s as though
such birds are saying “we’re so fit, we can invest in flashy, unnecessary things.”
Think of it as biological conspicuous consumption (Veblen, [1899] 2007). A
male bird simply can’t fake this kind of plumage, otherwise, low-quality males
could overtake the population by faking out females.
What’s this have to do with human rituals and the moral order? As Rappaport

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suggested, performing rituals conveys commitment to the gods and the moral
order of one’s community. Paying the costs of ritual is what reliably conveys
that commitment. It’s not enough to just say “I’m committed” or “I believe.”
Tattooing one’s favourite slogan on one’s forehead is an obvious demonstration
of commitment to an idea. Dancing with poisonous snakes at church under the
auspices of scaring away demons unquestionably conveys religious conviction.
Such acts also convey solidarity with the others who are a part of your group.
Given all this, imagine trying to join a community that requires sacrificing a goat
that you could otherwise use to feed your family. Imagine refusing to participate,
apathetically standing by on the periphery of the group, or not singing or praying
along with everyone else. This would likely convey a rejection of the tradition,
the individuals there, and the moral order endorsed by those individuals. You
aren’t likely to get invited again.
Such ritual costs, then, also play a gate-keeping role; high ritual costs keep
out the less-committed (Iannaccone, 1992, 1994). As such, they function as
assorting dedicated cooperators, thus resolving the aforementioned problem
of cooperation. Someone might try to join a cooperative group and just reap
the benefits (i.e., free-ride), but is less likely to if the costs are sufficiently
high. Ritual should therefore foster cooperative communities, keep out those
who might otherwise exploit the benefits provided by the group, and maintain
cooperation within the group by reliably conveying one’s devotion. This theory
generates a range of hypotheses.
First, if ritual costs reliably convey commitment, communities with more
taxing rituals should outlive those with fewer and/or less costly rituals. To test
this hypothesis, anthropologist Richard Sosis (2000) examined the life-span of
200 different religious and secular communes. The average age of a secular
commune in the sample was 6.4 years. The average age of religious communes
was 25.3, four times the lifespan of their secular counterparts. Sosis and Bressler
(2003) followed up on this study with a subsample of 83 communities and
found a similar pattern. Where religious communities had an average age
of 35.6 years, secular communities lasted only an average of 7.7. Moreover,
religious communities systematically had far more costly requirements than
secular groups, including food taboos, celibacy, bans on gambling, fasts, and so
forth.
Second, those who pay higher ritual costs should be more cooperative than
those who don’t. Many studies support this particular prediction. For instance,
Sosis and Ruffle (2003) found that on average, Israeli religious kibbutz members
who participated in group rituals took less money from a common pool than their
secular counterparts. In Mauritius, participation in the intensely painful kavadi
ritual induces more generous giving to charity than participation in a relatively

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more mundane set of rites (Xygalatas et al., 2013) and other evidence suggests
that such rituals also enhance cooperation among observers, even more than
participants (Mitkidis et al., 2017). One set of lab experiments (M. Lang, Chvaja,
Purzycki, Václavík, & Staněk, 2022) examined the social dynamics of signalling
by manipulating the costs of signals by random assignment. Participants got to
choose a group to play a “Public Goods Game” with. A Public Goods Game
requires that individuals put in a certain amount of money into a common
pool. That amount is multiplied by some factor (in this case doubled), and then
redistributed equally among the participants involved. In this experiment, one
group required an entry fee for everyone to convey “their intentions regarding
the size of the contribution to the common pool” (8). Some of these entry fees
were high and some were low. Another group required no such fee. Using a
preliminary study to class individuals into selfish and cooperative types, they
found that selfish participants were less likely to opt for the group that required
costly entry fees. Furthermore, while they wound up not earning more than
others, the individuals who opted for the group with higher entry fees wound up
giving more than others.
Third, because ritual costs reliably and honestly convey one’s intention to
commit to the group, those who observe others paying ritual costs will perceive
those individuals as more trustworthy. There are a few lines of cross-cultural
evidence across a variety of methods that support this particular prediction. In
one experiment, Purzycki and Arakchaa (2013) found that when individuals in
the Tyva Republic observe others who engage in communal rituals, they are more
likely to rate them as honest and trustworthy, more likely to ask them to babysit,
and more likely to trust that they would return borrowed and lost money. Ruffle
and Sosis (2020) found that secular and religious Israelis perceive religious
individuals as more trustworthy. Religiosity predicted trustworthiness and
willingness to trust others in economic experiments in Germany (Tan & Vogel,
2008) and Brazil (Soler, 2012). In India, individuals perceive the religiously
devout as being more hard-working, generous, good at giving advice, influential,
and having a good character, among other positive traits (Power, 2017a). A
companion study corroborates these ratings, finding that more religiously devout
individuals were indeed more generous in their social networks (Power, 2017b).
Fourth, ritual costs should be especially high in contexts where the looming
temptation to defect is also high. Utilising the cross-cultural Human Relations
Area Files data base (see Section 3), one study coded various ritual costs
across 60 societies (Sosis, Kress, & Boster, 2007). They also treated warfare
frequency as an index of the intensity of the temptation to defect; dying for
others is a difficult decision to make. As predicted, the study found that societies
reported as having more taxing rituals are also reported as more exposed to

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warfare, especially violent conflicts with other groups. Extreme rituals that
leave permanent indications (e.g., circum- and subincision, tattoos, scarring,
and piercing) are more prevalent in societies with external warfare.
This body of work suggests that ritual conveys one’s intentions to cooperate
with other group members. To the extent that the moral domain overlaps with
or is cooperation, it suggests that the costs of ritual reliably establish one’s
acceptance of the moral climate of his or her group. When social ties are tested,
ritual costs increase in ways that assort cooperators. Ritual is central for this
function. As we’ll see, culturally particular religious institutions and other
practices also provide venues for bringing people together in ways that resolve
locally specific threats to cooperation.
6.4 Practices, Cooperation, and Context
Ritual costs appear to contribute to human cooperation in significant ways.
But what of all of the variation we see in where and when religious rituals
take place (for other dimensions of variation in ritual, see Purzycki, 2024;
Whitehouse, 2004)? And what about the other practices that gods care about? If
cultural traditions like religious ritual can contribute to the kinds of cooperation
that have promoted human survival and reproduction, aspects of ritual should
co-vary with threats to well-being. To see the logic of this argument, let’s
compare two notably different traditions, the field burning practices of the Martu
of Western Australia and the water temples of Balinese rice farmers.
With appeals to their ancestors and the sacred law known as “The Dreaming”
(Jukurrpa), the Martu collectively burn expanses of fields in the western deserts
(D. W. Bird, Bird, Codding, & Taylor, 2016; R. B. Bird, Tayor, Codding, & Bird,
2013). When they burn these fields together, they can keep wildfires at bay.
Unlike fires started by lightning or by individuals, fires from collective burning
are easier to contain. But it’s arduous work and takes a lot of time and focus.
Player 2
Player 1 Burn Don’t Burn
Burn 𝑏0
Don’t Burn 𝑠 𝑠
Table 5 Payoffs for Player 1 in coordination in Martu field burning.

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Importantly, this practice has the downstream effects of enriching the soil,
thus producing seeds upon which rodents feed. Monitor lizards predate rodents
and the Martu hunt the monitor lizards, ultimately distributing them to other
community members (R. B. Bird & Power, 2015). As such, this tradition
generates important benefits for individuals, but only when they burn together.
As illustrated in Table 5, when the net benefits of burning together,
𝑏
, outweigh
the benefits of not bothering to chip in,
𝑠
, we have a social dilemma (specifically,
a “Stag Hunt”; see Bulbulia 2012 and Skyrms 2004 for further discussion).
Many Martu “believe that if they do not continue to re-enact the Jukurrpa
through emulating the creative forces of the ancestral beings across the land-
scape—hunting, collecting, burning and caring for family—those plants and
animals that depend on their actions will cease to exist” (R. B. Bird et al., 2013,
2). In the Martu worldview, then, burning is but one component of much larger
system of moral obligation toward others. This larger system is framed in the
context of living in accordance with “ancestral beings” and “The Dreaming.”
Compare this to the Balinese water temple system (Lansing, 1991, 2006;
Lansing & Kremer, 1993). In some areas of Bali, rice farmers plant and harvest
rice on expansive terraced hill- and mountainsides where water flows from the
tops of these terraces. Throughout the ages, farmers have developed a system of
water and plant management that more equitably distributes water and minerals
to rice paddies. How do they do this and what is the role of religious behaviour?
To appreciate this, let’s first examine the problem.
Downstream
Upstream Simultaneous Staggered
Simultaneous 1,1−𝑑1−𝑟, 1−𝑟
Staggered 1−𝑟, 1−𝑟1,1−𝑑
Table 6 Payoffs (upstream, downstream) for coordination game between
farmers.
As illustrated in Table 6, farmers here face a dilemma similar to the Prisoner’s
Dilemma. Let’s say you’re an upstream farmer who lives at the top of a hill. I
live downstream and farm paddies closer to the bottom of the hill. If we plant
our fields at the same time, you’ll get all the nutrients in the water because you
live closer to the source of the stream, thus leaving me with some depleted water
by the time it reaches my paddies. Let’s say if this happens, the water I get is

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depleted by
𝑑
. If we think about a rice yield as some quantity, say, 1, that means
you get 1 unit of rice and I get whatever remains,
1−𝑑
. It’s in our interest to get
the best water we can, so in this case, you’d want to plant simultaneously with
me, even though that doesn’t suit me best. Since the water source is continuous,
why not just alternate when we plant? That way, you can use good water first
and subsequently let good water you don’t need flow down to me.
The problem is that our fields are also threatened by pests. If we stagger our
planting schedule, your crop is likely to get infested with pests first, and then
they’ll just travel down to my crop after devouring yours. So, if we both stagger
our planting schedule, our crops will suffer by an amount of
𝑟
, but if we plant
simultaneously, the pests will have nowhere to go and thus leave for better fields.
So, if we choose to plant simultaneously, you are always better off, but I lose out.
But if we choose to stagger our planting schedule, we both lose out due to pests.
When would I, as a downstream farmer, want to coordinate with you to plant at
the same time? Under these conditions, only when pests are more devastating
than impoverished water (i.e., when 𝑟 > 𝑑) will I opt for your leftovers.
Once again, the dilemma is one of coordination: how can I get you to
release some of your good water so we can coordinate planting to reduce
pest infestation? Here is where the Balinese system functions to help people
coordinate. In Bali, distributed networks of “water temples” function as social
institutions that foster coordination and–if the above literature is any indication–
trust between farmers who are otherwise competing and coordinating around
resources and their threats. During the rituals conducted at these temples,
farmers pay their respects to local deities and symbolically exchange “holy
water.” However, it goes much more beyond symbols; each temple contributes
to coordinating the harvesting and planting schedules of participating farms into
superordinate collectives called subaks. In this way, farmers facing the challenge
of coordination and/or the temptation to use the best resources right away engage
in spiritually sanctioned cooperation. As it turns out, these collectives have
greater rice yields than their unorganized counterparts.
Considered together, these two examples (for more, see Bendixen et al., 2024;
Purzycki, Bendixen, et al., 2022) reveal some important themes. First, they
illustrate how religious traditions can revolve around cooperative dilemmas that
people face; it is clear that these traditions include practices that strengthen
social relationships. In order to procure benefits, individuals must work together
to generate them, but because doing so can come at a personal cost, there is
an inherent temptation to not cooperate. Defection harms others. As such,
a second theme these cases point to is the inherent moral nature of religious
practices more broadly than gods’ moral concerns and the moral landscape
encoded in ritual. They aren’t merely things that ought to be done. They also

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forge moral obligations, sentiments, and consist of cooperative strategies. Once
again, to the extent that “morality” is a social system that facilitates cooperation,
these practices–and the spiritual realm to which they appeal–are unambiguously
“moral.” Third, the specific dilemmas these groups face emerge as a result of
the way they make a living. If cultural traditions can facilitate human survival
in various conditions, it appears that these religious traditions have evolved
to address various social conditions. This strongly suggests that elements of
religion can flexibly attend to new conditions in ways that overcome cooperative
challenges (Purzycki & Sosis, 2009).
Finally, while the “cooperative” strategies in these examples are behaviours
believed to be endorsed by some form of spiritual entity, religious appeals
contain some serious consequences for not living up to prescribed behaviours.
These examples show us that problems and practices are not necessarily merely
culturally associated with gods. Just because a god knows and care about actions
that contribute to sustaining cooperation doesn’t mean that an individual will
actually do it or do it to the degree that’s expected. Rather, the gods and their
associated repercussions provide some motivation behind these individually
costly acts. Indeed, one important motivator for religious behaviour is the threat
of supernatural sanctions; learning to fear spiritual consequences for violations
of religious norms can propel individuals to act in ways that are individually
costly, but mutually beneficial. This brings us to the Supernatural Punishment
Hypothesis.
7 The Evolution of Religious Beliefs
7.1 Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis
As discussed in Section 5, one of the central ideas in the cognitive science of
religion is that our unprecedented perspective-taking abilities undergird beliefs
in gods. One theory suggests that because it conferred an advantage to their
survival and reproduction, more and more of our distant ancestors gradually
acquired this ability. Yet, the better individuals could anticipate others’ thoughts
and actions, the more they could influence and manipulate other people for their
own benefit. So, the more one could think through others’ thoughts, the more he
or she could exploit them. This threatens cooperation. As we saw, without other
mechanisms, Machiavellian exploiters could wind up undermining cooperation,
effectively breaking down social order and proliferate.
One theory wagers that through a series of pivotal shifts in human evolution,
natural selection favoured individuals who were especially sensitive to threats of

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spiritual punishment (D. D. P. Johnson, 2016; D. D. P. Johnson & Bering, 2006;
Rossano, 2007; Schloss & Murray, 2011). Drawn from this, the “supernatural
punishment hypothesis” predicts that fear of gods’ punishment is an important
mechanism that deters defectors.
In contexts where the cost of really getting punished outweighs any benefit one
could achieve by engaging in uncooperative behaviour, defecting on cooperation
is less likely. But when the potential benefits outweigh the costs, exploiting
others is advantageous. Punishment can be a reliable deterrent for self-interested
behaviour, but punishment also comes at a cost to the punisher in the form of, for
example, energy and organisation (Boyd & Richerson, 1992). If that’s the case,
why bother risking yourself to punish other people? According to Johnson’s
theory, fear of supernatural punishment evolved because it motivates avoiding
the real costs of getting punished for being selfish. Furthermore, supernatural
sanctions increase the perceived costs of defecting. In other words, it pays to
fear gods and it pays to promote that fear.
More formally, beliefs in supernatural punishment will come to dominate
a population (i.e., evolve and proliferate) when
𝑝𝑐 > 𝑏
, that is, when the
probability of getting caught for doing something bad,
𝑝
, and the costs of getting
punished,
𝑐
, outweigh the benefits,
𝑏
, that one could get for being uncooperative.
In this view, it’s adaptive to fear supernatural punishment in contexts with real
social costs for being selfish. Recall the supernatural monitoring hypothesis
(Section 5.2.3). In addition to the costs of punishment,
𝑐
, belief in supernatural
punishment can also ratchet up the perception of
𝑝
; even though other humans
might not see what you’re doing, a god most certainly can (Bourrat et al., 2011).
To test these ideas, Johnson (2005) used the SCCS using the problematic
“high gods” variable (see Section 4) and various indices of cooperation. Johnson
is uniquely candid about his caution regarding the difficulty of actually testing his
hypothesis using the SCCS. For instance, he admits that “The ideal variable for
this study would be a measure of the extent of belief in supernatural punishment
for selfishness within each society. Unfortunately, no such variable exists in
the SCCS database” (418, emphasis in original). He nevertheless proceeds
to exploit the high gods variable (see Section 4) recognising, among other
things, that “not all supernatural punishment is attributed to high gods” (420)
and notes how ubiquitous other forms of supernatural punishment are (432),
citing Swanson (1964) as evidence. Johnson uses a host of variables to measure
cooperation. Among other things, these include society size (because more
cooperation means wider sustained social networks), compliance with social
norms, more food sharing, and less internal strife. He found that most of the
19 variables associated with cooperation were correlated with the high gods
variable. Notably, “loyalty to the local or wider community” and “sharing of

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food” were not clearly associated with the high gods variable.
During this time, individual-level experimental studies addressing the re-
lationship between belief and cooperation also picked up steam. Evidence
from behavioural economics suggests that religion can promote cooperation
between anonymous strangers, but it might be contingent on context. For
example, Orbell et al. (1992) used a range of experimental versions of the
Prisoner’s Dilemma and found that Mormons were more cooperative with
anonymous strangers than non-Mormons. Importantly, the Mormon sample
played in a context where anonymous individuals were simply more likely to
be Mormon than non-Mormon. A decade later, Shariff and Norenzayan (2007)
conducted Dictator Game experiments among Canadian university students
using “implicit primes.” In these experiments, participants are given some
money (in this case 10 Canadian dollar coins) and asked to distribute them
between themselves and an anonymous receiver. Half of the participants had to
first solve a word scramble task that included statements such as “she felt the
spirit” and “the dessert was divine” and the other half unscrambled sentences
with no references to the sacred (dessert or otherwise). Those in the control
condition gave an average of 1.84 coins (
𝑆𝐷 =1.8
) whereas those in the implicit
prime condition gave just over four (
𝑀=4.22, 𝑆𝐷 =2.65
). In a follow-up
study, they found that a secular word-scramble task (with words like “civic,”
“jury,”and “police”) elicited a similar allocation as a religious prime condition
(
𝑀=4.60, 𝑆𝐷 =3.03
coins). In another study (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011),
they found that students’ beliefs in God’s punishment reduced cheating whereas
beliefs in a forgiving god induced cheating on a maths test. Elsewhere, the
authors cite this evidence as a demonstration of how belief in a punitive god can
reduce “moral transgressions” (Norenzayan et al., 2016, p. 11).
Implicit and explicit priming studies have since proliferated in the study
of religion and cooperation. Psychologist Azim Shariff (2015) concludes:
“Does religion increase moral behavior? Yes. Even though the effect is
parochial, bounded, transient, situationally constrained, and often overstated,
it is real” (112). Yet, multiple attempts to replicate these studies have failed
(e.g., Billingsley, Gomes, & McCullough, 2018; Gomes & McCullough, 2015)
and on numerous grounds, there is increasing scepticism about their veracity
(Galen, 2012). Eventually, a meta-analysis (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, &
Norenzayan, 2016) examining 92 different experimental studies found a robust
relationship between religious or religious-like priming and prosocial behaviours
in such experimental games. While positive evidence supports the case for
religious cognition containing a motivating force behind cooperation, there is
a considerable amount of variation in these experiments in terms of quality,
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such experiments’ utility and their subsequent inclusion in meta-analyses (see
Van Elk et al., 2015). The conditions under which implicit or explicit priming
can induce cooperation remains unclear and inconsistent across studies. Even if
they were clear, just how far this effect extends (i.e., how broadly people would
apply religiously-induced cooperation) also remains to be further clarified.
7.2 Moralistic Gods and Social Complexity Redux
Consider the evolutionarily recent development in human cooperation,
namely, that the vast majority of us now live in large-scale state societies,
regularly interacting with a multitude of anonymous, unfamiliar and unrelated
agents. In these contexts, individuals often behave in costly ways that benefit
others even when there is no obvious possibility of reciprocation or even a
high likelihood of punishment for non-cooperative behaviour (Bowles & Gintis,
2003). With so many non-reciprocal and indirect costs, how could large-scale
societies maintain their cohesion? Evolutionary explanations again draw on
morality as one way to resolve this particular scope problem, whether focusing
on, among other things, the ability of moral behaviour to signal individual
qualities (see Barclay, 2013; Baumard, André, & Sperber, 2013) or actively
constrain selfishness for group benefits (see Fehr, Fischbacher, & Gächter, 2002;
Turchin, Currie, Turner, & Gavrilets, 2013). This particular topic became
increasingly trendy in the evolutionary social sciences.
Capitalising on this trend, previous generations’ efforts, and the supernatural
punishment hypothesis, Norenzayan (2013) posited that so-called “big gods”
were associated with “big societies” and the two co-evolved in important ways.
More specifically, the more people believe gods are punitive, all-knowing, and
morally concerned, the more likely they will engage in cooperative behaviours
directed towards people who can’t directly reciprocate. This prosociality helps
societies expand since more people are willing to cooperate beyond their
immediate contacts. This heightened prosociality also allows groups to organize
together to dominate other groups and ultimately bring them into the fold
through conquest. Increased conflict brings more people together, and such
beliefs solidify such newfound alliances. Thus, in a cycle of escalation, the
larger populations became, the more widespread such beliefs became, and the
“bigger” the gods grew. According to the theory, this partially accounts for the
global ubiquity of “big god” traditions like Christianity and Islam. This work
distanced itself from Johnson’s supernatural punishment hypothesis partly on the
grounds that gods’ punishment might have accounted for parochial cooperation
and therefore relevant to more traditional religions, it did not account for the

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scope problem of more expansive prosociality. Gods that were more punitive,
more knowledgeable, and more morally concerned were better suited for social
complexity.
Simultaneously, another curious trend became a staple part of the narrative
about social complexity, morality, and the gods. A spate of claims re-emerged,
namely, that the religions of traditional or ancient societies had little to no
connection to morality:
•
“This isn’t to say that hunter-gatherers never use religion to discourage
troublesome or destructive behavior...But more typical of hunter-gatherer
societies is the observation...‘Relations to the spirits have no ethical
implication”’ (Wright, 2010, 24)
•
“the religions of small-scale societies including foragers often do not have
one or two powerful gods who are markedly associated with moral behaviour
(Roes and Raymond, 2003). Many gods are ambivalent or whimsical, even
creator gods” (Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2010, 124)
•
“In most ancient traditions, the gods were generally construed as unen-
cumbered with moral conscience and uninterested in human morality”
(Baumard & Boyer, 2013, 272)
•
“ancestral religions did not have a clear moral dimension” (Norenzayan,
2013, 127)
•
it is “a fact that evidence for moralising gods is lacking in the majority of
non-literate societies” (Whitehouse et al., 2019 [RETRACTED], 227)
•
“Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies –
the kind missionaries used to dismiss as ‘pagan’ – envisaged a spirit world
that cared little about the morality of human behaviour. Their concern was
less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more
about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed
suitable deference to them” (Whitehouse, Savage, Turchin, & Francois,
2019)
•
gods in small-scale societies are “weak, whimsical, and not particularly
moral” (Henrich, 2020, 131)
So, after generations of debate and fieldwork that resulted in the leading
anthropologists and sociologists of religion to reach the consensus view that
morality is linked–in various ways–to many small-scale religions, these stark
statements reflect a shift back to the bold generalisations Tylor and Service (see
Section 3). What happened?
One reason might be that these works drew from different definitions of
constructs of “morality” pertaining to the content and scope problems. To
the extent that clear and explicit definitions of “morality” are possible, they

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are rarely included in these works. When they are, they aren’t much beyond
everyday notions. For instance, one of these works suggests that “moral” refers
to concerns about “behaviors that actually harm other people” (Wright, 2010,
23), but this is so general that it is quite difficult to see how this could square with
the ethnographic record. Another (Norenzayan et al., 2016) provides examples
of “moral transgressions” that include deceptive behaviours such as “cheating
on taxes, accepting a bribe, adultery, and lying.” Here, morality is not defined
as generalized behaviours directed towards anyone and everyone, anonymous or
otherwise. Instead, morality’s scope and scale are qualified throughout (e.g.,
“Religious elements are not a necessary condition for cooperation or moral
behavior of any scale,” 3, or “Chiefdoms and early states predating the Axial
Age
16
by thousands of years had anthropomorphized deities that intervened in
social relations, although their moral scope and powers to punish and reward
were substantially narrower and more tribal than those of later, Axial gods,”
9, emphasis added). Morality can thus be extended to include “imagined
moral communities comprising strangers,” but morality is not assumed to be
universalised normative behaviour, but something with the capacity for expanded
applicability to anonymous strangers. In sum, it doesn’t appear to be the explicit
conceptions of morality in these works that led them to the conclusion that
small-scale traditions lack a “clear moral dimension” or that their traditional
gods were “uninterested in human morality” (see too D. D. P. Johnson, 2015;
Petersen, 2023).
Ultimately, these sources treat the lack of moral relevance of traditional
religions as something to be explained. Rather than something with a deep
and contentious history that has yet to be adequately resolved, it became an
assumption used to lend support to particular theories about the growth of
human societies. As such, bypassing the contentious history of this debate has
rhetorical advantages. In fact, journalist Robert Wright (2010) uncritically cites
Tylor (see Section 3) and specific ethnographic anecdotes as though they are
representative of foragers’ religions. In a footnote, Wright cites Swanson, but
focuses on afterlife beliefs and claims that “In only one of those ten [hunter-
16
The “Axial Age” refers to a period roughly between 800 and 200 BCE. Among others,
historians of religion treat this pivotal period as one of major developments in human culture and
society (Jaspers, 2014). See Section 7.3. While historian Robert Bellah (1970; 2011) makes some
distinctions between “tribal,” “archaic,” and “Axial” traditions, he treats religion’s connection to
morality as common–and central–across these society types. In fact, drawing from Durkheim, he
treats religion as “a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere
to them in a moral community” (2011, p. 1, 47). Throughout his discussion of tribal religions
(pp. 138-174), he finds these “moral communities” are promoted by religious myth, stories, and
rituals that provide “conceptions” and “guides” to living moral lives (172), despite these phenomena
lacking explicit rules or precepts.

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gatherer societies in Swanson’s data set] did the religion include any other
supernatural sanctions for this sort of behavior” (490, n. 42).
17
Yet as we saw,
Swanson’s data and conclusions emphatically and explicitly reject Tylor’s and
maintain the sentiments of the consensus reached by anthropologists of religion:
moralistic supernatural punishment is fairly common among bands, tribes, and
other non-state societies.
Similarly, another likely source of this shift comes from the uncritical
appeal to studies exploiting the SCCS. Indeed, some cite Roes and Raymond
(2003) as showing that small-scale societies lack “powerful gods who are
markedly associated with moral behavior” (Shariff et al., 2010) or that “powerful
moralizing gods appear in <10% of the smallest-scale human societies but
become widespread in large-scale societies” (Norenzayan et al., 2016), despite
Roes and Raymond (2003) relying on the dubious high gods variable. As can
be seen in Table 3, virtually all studies reporting a positive correlation between
moralistic high gods and social complexity exploit the SCCS. Unsurprisingly,
many surveys cite such evidence as supporting the view that the gods of small-
scale religions somehow lack an association with ethics or morality. Yet, we
know that the high gods variable has problems (e.g., not all moralistic gods
are high gods) and that some of the sources that populate this dataset were
created under political and methodological conditions we wouldn’t accept today.
Thankfully, as we have newer databases and a return to examining beliefs and
behaviours in the field, there is a decreasing need to rely on the SCCS variables
and data to assess the global relationship between morality and the gods.
7.3 Cross-Cultural Databases Redux
Ongoing efforts have overcome some of the problems associated with the
SCCS data. For example, the Pulotu database (Watts, Sheehan, et al., 2015)
includes a wide range of quantitative data coded from ethnographic materials of
societies throughout Austronesia. Importantly, by taking pains not to conflate
the reported absence of a trait and the trait not being discussed in the literature,
this data set avoids many of the aforementioned pitfalls of the SCCS data.
Moreover, the coding procedures are transparent. For instance, Pulotu codes
“broad supernatural punishment” only when “the concept of a supernatural agent
17
It is unclear how Wright came to this observation as there are nine categories of principal
source of food in Birth of the Gods. These include collecting and gathering (
𝑛=3
), fishing (
𝑛=2
),
hunting (
𝑛=6
), though others include hunting or fishing and root crops (
𝑛=3
), hunting or fishing
and grain crops (
𝑛=2
), and harvesting from trees which require some care if they are to bear a crop
(
𝑛=3
). If we take just the three categories of collecting, fishing, and hunting, there are 11 societies,
five of which are coded as having at least one instance of supernatural sanctions for morality.

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or process that reliably monitors and punishes selfish actions, and this concept
must (i) be widely advocated within the community, (ii) involve punishment of
a broad range of selfish behaviours and (iii) apply to a wide range of community
members” (2).
As it turns out, while there are hardly any morally concerned high gods in the
data set of 137 groups (only six societies were reported to have them), there are
many instances of moralistic supernatural punishment across all societies. In fact,
among the 74 societies coded has having the lowest levels of political complexity
(i.e., relatively simpler chiefdoms and those societies without major heads of
power), 27 were coded as having moralistic supernatural punishment (36%).
Overall, 37 different groups’ literatures reported broad supernatural punishment
of selfish behaviours (50%). In a major study, Watts et al. (2015) examined the
historical relationship between social complexity and supernatural punishment
of various kinds. They found that generalized supernatural punishment is more
likely to predate social complexity than moralistic high gods. The latter appear
after social complexity emerges, but since only three of the six societies with
moralistic high gods were coded as complex, there are very little data with
which to draw inferences.
Another database, Seshat, was developed to assess societal evolution through
history and pre-history. Instead of focusing on cultural groups like the SCCS and
Pulotu, Seshat initially included data coded from historical records of various
geographic regions through time, which means that if other traditions colonize
the particular area, there is little to say about the evolution of specific traditions.
Using this database, one article (Whitehouse et al., 2019 [RETRACTED])
assessed the historical relationship between social complexity and moralistic
supernatural punishment. The farther back in time we go, the less information
we have. The historical record is virtually barren before the advent of writing
and archaeological evidence rarely provides unambiguous examples of morally
concerned gods (e.g., see Raffield, Price, & Collard, 2019; Rossano, 2023). As
such, there was very little data with which to work. In fact, 61% of all of the
possible data points for moralising gods simply had no data.
By way of handling these unknown values, the researchers converted all of
these cases for moralistic supernatural punishment into zeroes, thus treating
moralistic supernatural punishment as “absent.” Since the bulk of these values
were for historically deep societies of relatively low social complexity, this
manoeuvre provided the very answer the study was designed to assess. That is,
going back through time, societies were simpler and lacked data. Before testing
whether such societies have moralistic gods, the researchers declared them to
be absent. Thus, nearly 500 absent data points drove the result: small-scale
societies far back in time don’t have moralistic gods. Among other issues (see

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Beheim et al., 2021; Shin et al., 2019), this particular problem contributed to
the paper’s subsequent retraction.
The report’s public retraction notice frames the issue as a mistake in the data
itself rather than the conversion that took place during analysis (Whitehouse et
al., 2021). A subsequent report (Turchin et al., 2023b) uses a newer version of
the data set where virtually all of the values that were originally unknown were
converted to “inferred absent” (Purzycki, Bendixen, & Lightner, 2023). These
“inferred absent” values were subsequently recoded and merged with “absent”
values; 463 out of 471–98.3%–of data now treated as “absent” were actually
“inferred absent” values which were almost entirely missing from the original
data set. Now citing historians and various sources commenting on the target
societies to justify the “inferred” absences, the new report finds a similar result,
namely, that there is no evidence that moralistic supernatural punishment causes
social complexity.
The authors note that
the study of world history demonstrates that...the primary mode of religion of
early and small-scale social formations, are less likely to be highly moralizing.
In [such] systems, morality is situational and communal. While some aspects
of the supernatural may be connected to pro-social norms in these societies
(such as ideas about loyalty to kin), these religions tend to lack abstract,
universalizing ethical codes (Turchin et al., 2023a, 226).
Of course, no previous study equates moralistic supernatural punishment with
“abstract, universalizing ethical codes.” Furthermore, their admittedly “high
standard” of morality being the “primary concern” in such traditions would
constrain any analysis by virtue of its narrowness (see Fitouchi, André, &
Baumard, 2023), not to mention the difficulty of ascertaining it in the historical
and archaeological records of ancient small-scale populations. Given how much
of this “demonstration” is inferred, more concrete answers await further inquiry.
In addition to ignorance, part of the suite of problems inherent in such studies
lies in the fact these databases rely on coarse, group-level data that are not
crafted from systematic studies conducted among individuals (see Section 4.3).
Yet, we know that there can be considerable variation within groups, just as there
is variation between them (D’Andrade, 1987). Furthermore, many studies seek
to draw inferences about individual behaviour, not population characteristics.
Sometimes, relationships at the group level mask or even run counter to traits
at the individual level. Take, for example, the suggestion that wealthy people
are attracted to moralistic religions because the wealthy use such beliefs to
justify their judgement of the poor’s behaviour. Using historical data, Baumard
et al. (2015) found that increases in ancient societies’ projected wealth in the

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form of per capita/diem kilocalories brought them to the so-called “Axial Age”
(see note 16), a period often associated with the rise of “moralistic traditions”
like Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam. Using individual-level
data from different groups around the world, one study (Purzycki, Ross, et al.,
2018) found the same thing at the level of groups; average food security of
a group predicted its average rating of how morally concerned deities were.
However, there was no relationship at the level of individuals; the degree to
which individuals worried about procuring food was in no way associated with
the degree to which they claimed their gods cared about theft, murder, and
deceit (for further discussion, see Mullins et al., 2018). Indeed, it appears
that when we conduct individual-level studies in the field, we are compelled
to revisit the conclusions of previous generations of anthropologists. That is,
gods’ association with morality is just not that rare among the world’s different
religions.
7.4 Supernatural punishment in the field
7.4.1 Effects of beliefs
Despite the mixed evidence from the group-level historical and ethnographic
databases, individual-level data collected in the field strongly suggests that
supernatural punishment can contribute to cooperation and its expansion. For
example, economists Hadnes and Schumacher (2012) conducted Trust Games
in villages in Burkina Faso of sub-Saharan Africa. They study found that not
only did traditional religious beliefs include supernatural punishment of moral
transgressions including dishonesty and theft, but also that those endorsing such
beliefs contributed more on average in the Trust Game. Cultural psychologist
Rita McNamara brought an experiment to Yasawa, Fiji (McNamara, Norenzayan,
& Henrich, 2016). Focusing on the Christian deity and local ancestor spirits, she
assessed if beliefs in these gods’ punishment predicted equitable distributions
of money in a game that measured honest play. She reasoned that because the
Christian god is associated with generalized morality and the local spirits are
associated more with community norms, when people believe they are more
punitive than kind, individuals will alter their behaviour accordingly.
In her experiments, participants were instructed to allocate 30 coins to two
different individuals designated by cups using a fair two-coloured die. First,
they had to think of which cup they wanted to put a coin into. If the die came
up one colour, participants were supposed to put the coin into the cup of which
they mentally chose. If the die came up the other colour, they were supposed to

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put the coin into the cup opposite to what they had in mind. Participants knew
that the money would go to whomever was described on the cups, including
themselves. If followed, these rules would generate a random coin allocation
(hence “Random Allocation Game”); it wouldn’t matter which cup players
thought of because there was a random chance a coin would go into any given
cup. However, individuals played alone and could easily put as many coins into
whichever cup they wanted. The assumption, then, is that individuals will bias
their allocations to benefit themselves and local community members at the
expense of distant co-religionists. And they do. If participants deviate from
chance allocations, one can see systematic overall deviations with statistical
analysis (Hruschka et al., 2014). Among other things, the more participants
claimed God and the ancestor spirits punished, the more they played fairly
towards anonymous strangers (note that these results were contingent on how
much participants worried about having enough food to eat).
Expanding this work, The Evolution of Religion and Morality Project
(M. Lang, Purzycki, Henrich, & Norenzayan, 2024; Purzycki, Henrich, &
Norenzayan, 2024) measured individual responses to a wide range of ques-
tions regarding beliefs and practices. After selecting two focal deities (again,
the “moralistic” and “local” from Section 6.2) on the basis of quantitative
ethnographic data, this team of researchers carried out behavioural economic
experiments across 15 societies. These experiments consisted of at most two
experimental Random Allocation Games like above, and another that measured
generosity, a Dictator Game where participants simply allocate any amount of
money to other individuals and keep the rest. Overall, the more people claimed
their gods knew and punished people, the more they played fairly and generously
toward anonymous, geographically distant people who shared the same religious
affiliation (for further discussion, see M. Lang et al., 2019; Purzycki et al., 2016).
That is, the more individuals claimed their gods knew and punished, the more
they exhibited the kind of anonymous and expansive cooperation required to
sustain large-scale societies. Recent cross-cultural evidence (Pasek et al., 2023)
using a Dictator Game suggests that simply having participants think about God
can increase generosity even toward religious outgroups.
However, these studies did not find that moralistic gods promote cooperation
any more or broader than relatively less moralistic “local” gods (Purzycki, Lang,
Henrich, & Norenzayan, 2022). In fact, the degree to which people claimed
their gods cared about morality did not predict behaviour much at all. Across
scale questions asking how often such gods punished theft, deceit, and murder,
free-response methods asking what angers and pleases the target gods, and a
wide range of analyses, how “moralistic” gods were was of no clear consequence
to cooperation (Bendixen et al., 2023). Furthermore, the experimental design

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did not allow a comparison between tradition types. Recipients on the cups were
typically described as co-religionists of the tradition associated with moralistic
gods, e.g., the Christian god or Hindu Shiva rather than local traditions (e.g.,
spirit-masters or ancestor spirits). It is also important to note that these studies
still exhibited considerable cross-cultural variation. While individuals were
more likely to offer money when they believed their gods to be knowledgeable
and punitive, some sites showed far more (or less) cooperation than others. In
fact, some of the most selfish behaviour in these experiments were among those
thoroughly steeped in Christianity (e.g., Yasawa; see Fig. 2). This suggests that
factors beyond beliefs are playing an important role in accounting for religious
prosociality and its absence.
In sum, we still lack evidence that “moralistic gods” specifically promote
cooperation in ways any different from the other gods. Yet, supernatural punish-
ment and monitoring beliefs of various gods are associated with cooperating
beyond parochial boundaries. This suggests that the age-old hyper-emphasis
of gods’ “moral concern”–universal, parochial, “primary,” anonymous, or
otherwise–is an otiose factor in promoting cooperation. And, when we look at
individual-level data from real, living people, it becomes even clearer that the
very construct of a “moralistic god,” the theories ostensibly striving to account
for them, and the methods typically deployed in their assessment deserve serious
reconsideration.
7.4.2 “Local” gods punish immoral behaviour
Recall the findings recounted earlier, where indigenous Siberians from
the Tyva Republic were–when asked–resoundingly inclined to associate their
gods with knowledge and concern of human moral conduct (Purzycki, 2011,
2013a). Using data collected in the Evolution of Religion and Morality Project,
Purzycki et al. (2022) followed up on this line of work. They found that across
13 traditions’ “local” gods (i.e., those selected to be less morally concerned,
knowledgeable, and punitive), participants rated nearly all of them as morally
punitive to a significant degree. Yet, even the so-called “moralistic gods” weren’t
always rated as especially moralistic. Figure 2 shows the density plots of average
responses to a three-item “moral interest scale” across 15 sites.
What about the cultural inference hypothesis (see Section 5.2.3)? Did
responses about “local gods” simply reflect beliefs about the “moralistic gods”?
In most cases, the overlap between the “moralistic” and the “local” gods on
these scales are virtually complete. That is, the correlation between the ratings
of the two gods in each site were quite strong. Yet, as it turns out, the likelihood

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66 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Cachoeira
†
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Co.Tanna
†
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Huatasani
†
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
In.Tanna
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Kananga
†*
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Marajo
†
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Mauritius
*
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Mysore
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Sursurunga
†*
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Turkana
†*
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Tyva Republic
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Yasawa
†*
−2 −1 0 1 2
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Hadza
**
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Lovu
***
−1 0 1 2 3 4 5
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Samburu
†***
Figure 2 Density plots of mean moralistic punitive interest scores of
“moralistic” (gray) and “local” (white) gods across 15 populations
Note: Dotted line marks bottom of the scale (minimum was 0, maximum was 4).
†
Moralistic god is Christian deity; *Commitment to local deity is illegal, taboo, or
frowned upon; **Hadza used a different scale to answer question; ***No local deity
data provided
Source: Figure adapted from Lightner et al. (2023).

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of claiming local gods punish moral infractions holds after statistically holding
constant this correlation. Furthermore, the solitary group of hunter-gatherers in
the sample, the Hadza foragers of Tanzania, were asked to freely list the kinds
of things that anger two of their deities (Ishoko and Haine, associated with the
moon and sun respectively). Items coded as “morality” were the most common
items listed across both gods. There was no clear relationship between listing
moral items and individuals’ exposure to missionaries.
In fact, the exceptions to associating “local” gods with moralistic punishment–
most clearly seen in Mauritius (where local spirits were the nam associated with
black magic), and among the Kananga, Sursurunga, Turkana, and Yasawans
(where participants answered questions about ancestor spirits)–are contexts
where engaging in practices devoted to such deities is either illegal or where the
dominant religion (typically Christian, as denoted by the crosses in the upper
corners of each plot) sanctions against or competes with the “local” tradition.
Given what we know about some of the missionary and other reports used
in cross-cultural datasets, this particular finding should be unsurprising. The
default god, then, appears to be moralistic. Exceptions are accounted for when
dominant traditions have deemed such spirits immoral to engage!
A clutch of other important examples from field research further suggest that
the gods of small-scale or non-world religions are unambiguously associated
with morality. For example, after getting reminders of supernatural punishment
of local spirits thought to “bring misfortune to individuals who fail to share
with others and reward those who are especially generous” (Townsend et al.,
2020, 3), Ik (Uganda) participants were more generous to needy, anonymous
community members than those in a control condition. Singh et al. (2021)
found that the horticultural Mentawai on Siberut Island, Indonesia, believe in a
local spirit called Sikameinan who punishes people when they don’t share food,
particularly hunted meat. If an infraction occurs, individuals can host rituals
that involve food sharing and public apologies for being greedy. It appears, then,
that the insights gleaned from generations of dedicated cross-cultural fieldwork
are re-confirmed with contemporary fieldwork. In addition to bolstering the
insights and observations of generations past, empirical substantiations of this
relationship using contemporary methods are also adding important nuance to
the narratives about the relationship between morality and the gods. As the field
appears to be just warming up to this possibility, there’s a considerable amount
of work that remains to be done.

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8 Rethinking Morality and the Gods
8.1 Summary
From the edicts of the Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi to the theories and methods
of the social sciences, the tangled relationship between the gods and how we
treat each other has inspired some major cultural achievements. Indeed, four
thousand years after the Sumerians, the social sciences still find the relationship
between morality and the gods a source of inspiration (and frustration). This
Element suggests that the story–our theories and how we go about assessing
them–needs, once again, to be rewritten.
To synthetically summarize the most current evidence reviewed in this
text, then, we might say–variation in theoretical and operational definitions
notwithstanding–that:
humans perceive gods that play a role in human lives as minds that are
interested in their behaviour. Around the world, individuals readily associate
their gods with moral interest and punishment of moral infractions. While
beliefs in gods’ punishment and knowledge can motivate cooperation in
ways that go beyond one’s local community, the degree to which they are
thought to punish immoral behaviour as of yet shows no clear relationship to
corresponding behaviour. Religious rituals can contribute to cooperation as
their costs reliably convey that one is committed to one’s group and moral
norms, while other religious behaviours can contribute to specific, local
threats to cooperation, thus promoting within-group prosociality and curbing
selfishness.
Instead of being tenuously connected to common aspects of moral life or only
present in the globalized religions, important elements of religion from all
walks of human life are intrinsically linked to moral systems (Teehan, 2020) and
the use and distribution of resources (see Atran et al., 2002; Hartberg, Cox, &
Villamayor-Tomas, 2016). For all intents and purposes, the gods’ relationship to
morality is varied, but constant: beliefs might harness the kinds of psychological
systems that promote interpersonal conduct, religious narratives describe and
portray how people ought to comport themselves, and the sense of obligation
and group solidarity religious behaviours convey are all part of religions’ ethical
dimensions.
Research continues to probe the relationship at various analytical levels:
•cognition and belief: gods’ intuitive associations with moral concern
•
beliefs and individuals: if and how beliefs in supernatural punishment and

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monitoring induce individually costly behaviours that promote cooperation
•
beliefs and society: if and how beliefs in moralistic supernatural pun-
ishment and monitoring promote cooperation beyond direct reciprocal
transactions
•
practices and individuals: how participation in costly rituals promotes
trust and cooperation within communities
•
practices and society: if religious behaviours are cooperative strategies in
locally specified social dilemmas
•
society and resources: what role religious traditions play in how societies
manage and distribute resources
Of course, the study of this relationship continues to evolve; from how we
conceive and operationalise to how we measure and theorise, it’s clear that the
conversation will continue to be re-crafted. This concluding section discusses
ways that might help the conversation progress.
8.2 Terminology
In our quest to better understand the relationship between gods and morality,
it’s important that we exert some effort in how we frame our questions. Given
the fluidity of concepts like “morality” and “religion,” it helps to ensure that
we’re actually having the same conversation we think we’re having with others.
As we’ve seen, this has not always been the case. Indeed, how we think of and
measure abstract things like “moralistic supernatural punishment” can play a
major role in how we answer key questions in the study of religion and human
relationships, particularly when it means coding elusive realities preserved
in historical and ethnographic texts. As these are abstract notions, clarity is
difficult to come by. At the very least, we can strive to be consistent, being
explicit about where we diverge from the conversation, and how that might
matter. Maintaining some consistency would also constrain how we measure
our constructs.
Consider the first question asked in this Element: how common is the
connection between the gods and morality? If “morality” is simply any
designation of “ought” or “help and harm,” then the relationship is probably
near-universal; all around the world, people claim that gods and spirits care
about things they should do. Far from being capricious or apathetic, it is quite
likely that all known societies entertain the idea that spiritual agents of some
form will alter the course of their lives if they do or don’t do certain things.
Alternatively, if we instead think of morality exclusively in terms of explicit,
documented, and universalising doctrines of pro- and anti-social behaviour,

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then there is no reason to think that religions are moralistic everywhere. But
this point is rather banal; gods are unlikely to know and care about the entire
planet’s human population if a society knows and cares little to nothing about
the rest of the world. If instead, we are to treat morality synonymously with
cooperative strategies in social dilemmas, and religion cross-culturally regulates
selfish strategies, then it follows that all religions really are inextricably linked
to morality.18
8.3 Theory
From the devolutionary or progressivist views of thinkers past to the cultural
epidemiologists and adaptationists of contemporary inquiry, theories should
generate empirically testable predictions. To the extent that theories are
competing with each other, the failure or success of empirical scrutiny should
determine the fate of a particular theory. Yet, many theories appear to be framed
as competing more in style than in substance.
Take, for instance, cultural epidemiological approaches to religion that
emphasize the cognitive foundations undergirding religious traditions. Contem-
porary cultural evolutionary functionalism posits a feedback loop between the
outcome of religious beliefs and practices and their persistence and proliferation
(Purzycki, Bendixen, et al., 2022; Purzycki & Sosis, 2022). Finding evidence
that religious concepts are “catchy” or made possible by deeper cognitive
systems doesn’t rule out the possibility that they might also serve some purpose
at the community level and that their effects contribute to their transmission.
Indeed, different theories variously focus on different aspects of dynamic,
complicated processes. Some theories are primarily interested in explaining
particular aspects of religion (e.g., explaining the moralistic traditions) whereas
others are focused on accounting for how elements of religious traditions induce
moral behaviour or cooperation. Others still focus on social complexity. There
is considerable debate in the field, despite these different foci and ultimately
different models of what causes what (van Baars, 2023).
Furthermore, despite the changes in theoretical trends over the years, many
18
Even if we were to come to some consensus on this particular front, we might still struggle
with fundamental issues of evolution of human societies. Gone are the days of Morgan and Service.
In fact, recent works suggest that even the notion of a so-called “small-scale society” needs revision
and foraging and other “traditional” peoples exhibit notably complex networks of cooperation and
institutions that mediate between-group relations (D. W. Bird, Bird, Codding, & Zeanah, 2019;
Boyd & Richerson, 2022; Glowacki & Lew-Levy, 2022; Graeber & Wengrow, 2021). The extent
to which religion had anything to do with this–or any other indices of contemporary state-level
societies and their urban centres–needs further attention.

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of the core hypotheses have undergone little revision. Take the position that
small-scale traditions lack an association with morality. We now know that the
progressivism of past generations is false and ethnocentric. Yet, it predicted that
morality is primarily associated with the “higher” religions. Some contemporary
cultural evolutionary theories suggest that because moralistic gods are particular
cultural strains that can contribute to social complexity and for this reason, we
see that such gods are common among the world’s major traditions and lacking in
small-scale societies. Others find that the wealth accumulated by Axial traditions
accounts for how moralistic their religions were. What differs between these
views is how this happened; progressivism held that through aeons of tinkering
and improvement, religions will ultimately become moralistic, one view argues
that particular forms of cultural selection will favour more cooperative groups,
especially under conditions of between-group competition and conflict, and
the other emphasizes the generation of wealth simulates the trend to associate
religion with morality. Yet, most studies do not assess these processes at all.
In other words, while we might find a correlation between moralistic (high
god) traditions and social complexity, and this evidence might be consistent
with what our theories predict, we aren’t necessarily ruling competing theories
that predict the same thing. In other words, there’s a sizeable gulf between
theories, corresponding models of theorised processes, and the evidence we use
to evaluate them.
Some theoretical predictions do, however, appear to diverge in more tractable
ways. Take, for example, the supernatural punishment hypothesis that stipulates
that fear of gods’ punishment evolves under conditions where the costs of real
punishment and the likelihood of getting caught outweigh the benefits one could
reap by breaching norms of morality (D. D. P. Johnson, 2005). Others, however,
suggest that religion will evolve to address particular social dilemmas when
there aren’t already cost-effective secular solutions in place (Bendixen et al.,
2024). In other words, gods’ punishment evolved to avoid real punishment vs.
gods go to where punishment is otherwise ineffective or absent. To resolve these
particular divergences, we might assess the longitudinal change in the kinds of
things that gods care about, their correspondence to secular means to detect and
adjudicate deviations from “good” behaviour, and their relative effectiveness.
This points to a more fundamental question posed throughout this text: why
gods? Many answers are on offer and this Element discussed only a few (see
D. D. P. Johnson, 2011; Rossano & LeBlanc, 2017). Some suggest that gods are
cognitively attractive concepts while others suggest they promote cooperation
and do so in cost-effective ways. The existence of such beings is difficult to
demonstrate, we are adept at conjuring explanatory phantoms, and we harbour a
deep-seated aversion to costly punishment. These factors might contribute to

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cooperation and therefore the longevity of a group above and beyond relatively
more concrete, secular, human-driven institutions. These speculations are
possibilities, but we lack well-defined theories that speak to ideal constellations
of religious mechanisms for this purpose. As there are many other spiritual
and secular entities related to morality, we might be able to make informative
comparisons and thus discard theories lacking evidence.
While it appears that beliefs in gods’ punishment and knowledge can con-
tribute to cooperation cross-culturally (M. Lang et al., 2024; Purzycki et al.,
2024), there remains no evidence that beliefs about what the gods care about
actually affect individual behaviour (Bendixen et al., 2023). This has further
contributed to rethinking the significance and function of beliefs about what
gods want. Some suggest that gods’ desires are better conceived as appeals
to other people rather than motivations of one’s own behaviour (Bendixen et
al., 2024; Fitouchi et al., n.d.; Purzycki, Bendixen, et al., 2022). How these
appeals–and the behaviours they point to–change through time remains to be
seen. To the best of our knowledge, the kinds of things people associate with
their gods’ concerns–these “god problems”–are cooperative strategies in locally
salient threats to social life. That is, religious traditions can evolve in ways
that address new social dilemmas. As such, “moralistic gods” might best be
thought of as historically contingent responses to exposure to a wider set of
social dilemmas. This makes some sense, especially in light of recent evidence
that suggests that in denser social environments, individuals tend to make their
moral stances more generally applicable (Jackson et al., 2023). To the extent that
social complexity consists of more ways and opportunities to defect, gods might
become explicitly moral to point to the diversity of threats. In other words, even
though beliefs in gods’ concerns do not necessarily motivate behaviour, these
appeals nevertheless evolve. This makes some sense considering that explicitly
moralistic gods appear to induce cooperation no differently from beliefs in gods
that care about other things.
In this view, behaviour is of paramount importance. One recent study
(Ge et al., 2019) found that in northwestern China, participants’ beliefs in
supernatural punishment did not reliably predict making donations, but their
religious participation did. Furthermore, there are many cross-cultural examples
of religious rituals mediating intergroup relations. Take, for example, the secret
epeme rituals among the foraging Hadza. These male-centred traditions promote
solidarity between men of disparate, fluid camps (Hill, Wood, Baggio, Hurtado,
& Boyd, 2014). In Inner Asia, extended families open their private ritual
areas to outsiders to make their own offerings to spirits and outsiders’ families
reciprocate in kind (Mongush, 1992, 169). Here too, looking beyond beliefs is a
critical area for examining the role religion plays on the moral landscape, but

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also looking beyond ritual toward the other activities gods care about is also
sorely needed.
8.4 Methods
As discussed throughout this Element, much of the research topic assessing
the relationship between morality and religion has been drawn from cross-
cultural datasets. The difficulties involved in the creation of such databases are
increasingly appreciated and made transparent (Watts et al., 2022). Most critical
perhaps is the distinction between the data we use and the reality that data are
supposed to represent. For reasons discussed earlier, we should not naively
equate the two (see McElreath, 2020; Purzycki et al., 2023). Many processes
interfere with the fidelity between the ethnographic or historical reality and the
data that populates such data sets. Such data might be thought of as “
𝑛th
-order
gossip” (cf. Handwerker, 2001). That is, there are multiple layers of distortion
and error involved in the data generation process. Populations exist(ed) and
likely exhibit considerable within-group variation. Some of this was revealed or
observed (or not) by various agents like missionaries, travellers, or ethnographers
who in turn selected what to report in further filtered manuscripts which were,
in turn, coded and re-coded by interested researchers. There is a lot lost (and
gained) in this process.
Aside from the usual errors in fact, interpretation, and bias, such data are also
a product of their time. It seems fairly obvious that, say, observers’ descriptions
of how people make a living (e.g., foraging, fishing, etc.) would have higher
fidelity than, say, a society’s religious beliefs, especially when so many sources
are from missionary reports. Moreover, many important details are simply
left out of reports due to a host of unknown reasons (e.g., observers didn’t
think they were important, they didn’t know or see them, etc.). Without careful
consideration of these processes, studies really amount to describing data sets
and perhaps the sources that made them possible, but they are a far, far cry
from the reality researchers claim to be assessing. This might be why some
cross-cultural datasets find moralistic gods everywhere, while others infer their
absence everywhere.
Such studies should carefully attend to metadata in ways that appropriately
capture the sources of uncertainty that go into their production. How much
of an impact do racist missionary sources in these records have? How much
does direct, prolonged fieldwork play on the chances that a source reports the
presence of a moralistic god (high or otherwise)? Do intellectual trends of
the time affect the likelihood of mentioning such deities? These are empirical

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74 Elements in the Psychology of Religion
questions. Imagine a scenario where generations of researchers were taught–
primarily with appeals to group-level databases like the SCCS–that societies
less socially complex than states rarely (if ever) have religions that are associated
with morality? Could, say, historians or other social scientists draw upon this
training to subsequently infer particular states of the past? Could this not have
contributed to an increasingly stark characterisation of the evolution of religion?
One study (Lightner et al., 2023) shows that roughly half of the SCCS’s
source materials are from the time of Tylor or before. The most recent source in
the SCCS was published the same year Evans-Pritchard dismissed the position
that small-scale traditions lacked gods with “high moral attributes.” As we know,
both theory and method rapidly developed in the intervening years. During
that time, of course, missionisation was also well underway, thus potentially
compounding the problem of data reliability. Teasing apart these factors will be
important in future work designed to infer the development of such traditions, but
also intended to reliably infer the antiquity of what we find among contemporary
societies.
At this point in the development of social sciences, there really is no sound
reason to uncritically accept categorical statements such as “population X
doesn’t have a moralistic tradition” or “population type Y lacks moralistic gods”
without evidence that was systematically collected from appropriate samples of
individuals. Consider the case of the foraging !Kung San from Tanzania. In one
source–often cited to reinforce the idea that foraging societies lack moralistic
supernatural punishment (e.g., Norenzayan et al., 2016; Peoples & Marlowe,
2012; Wright, 2010)–the San are characterized as not needing moralistic gods
and that “Man corrects or avenges such wrong-doings himself in his social
context. [The god] Gao!na punishes people for his own reasons, which are
sometimes quite obscure” (Marshall, 1962, 245). Yet, another ethnography
(Lee, 2003) suggests that the //gangwasi ancestor spirits are believed to make the
San sick when people quarrel with each other (129-130). If we’re interested in
whether the San have moralistic gods, which are we to trust? How representative
are these views?
Reliable data should be collected using surveys and experiments, not casual
observations or solitary quotes from key informants. And even with better
data, we must be careful about how generalisable such conclusions are. What
constitutes consensus? What do the data need to show to reliably indicate that a
god is “moralistic?” Again, despite generations of declarations and debate, it
wasn’t until the first decade of the 21st century that finally introduced dedicated
survey studies were brought to bear on the question of gods’ moral concerns
(Purzycki, 2011, 2013a). Such focused studies are changing our views of what
the gods of non-state communities are like. In fact, the first quantitative studies

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of religion among the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups,
also emerged only recently. They suggest that many individuals readily associate
the sun and moon deities with moral interest and punitive abilities (Purzycki,
Willard, et al., 2022). Furthermore, whether missionaries have influenced
such beliefs remains uncertain (see Apicella, 2018; Stagnaro, Stibbard-Hawkes,
& Apicella, 2022). Simply declaring that religions are moralistic (or not) is
insufficient. If anthropological fieldwork has taught us anything, it’s that people
think and behave in remarkably diverse ways. If anthropologists have taught us
anything, it’s that we should ask.
But psychology has also taught us that what people say is not necessarily
consistent with how they think or behave. Only recently have we measured the
distinction between culturally explicit and intuitive beliefs about gods’ moral
concern. What do our theories actually predict? Do they speak to intuitive or
reflective beliefs? How do our methods tap into them (or not)? At the end of
the day, we must also vigilantly ask: so what? If gods tend to be moralistic at
least intuitively, does it have anything to do with how we treat each other or we
have adapted to new environments? Considerable research suggests that the
gods do matter, but research and casual observation also suggest that the gods
are unnecessary devices that bolster morality. If gods are optimal solutions to
cooperative threats, evidence of this possibility remains to be seen. Further,
while research in secularisation (e.g., Inglehart, 2020) continues to probe the
conditions under which the gods’ sway on our moral lives dwindles, there is
plenty to learn–and apparently time to learn it–before that happens completely.

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Acknowledgements
Many thanks go to Adam Baimel, Bret Beheim, Theiss Bendixen, Joe Henrich,
Josh Jackson, Martin Lang, Aaron Lightner, Ryan McKay, Rita McNamara, Ara
Norenzayan, Anne Pisor, Cody Ross, Joni Sasaki, Nick Stagnaro, Richard Sosis,
Olivier van Baars, and Joseph Watts for their collaborations on these topics over
the past few years. I thank Jonathan Jong for his encouragement and the editorial
care he took with this volume. Many thanks also go to Daniel Major-Smith,
Richard Sosis, Connor Wood, and to the two reviewers, whose careful reading
and constructive feedback were very helpful. I gratefully acknowledge the
Aarhus University Research Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust
(#TRT-2022-31107) for generous support as I worked on this manuscript. I’d
like to dedicate this work to Jessica McCutcheon, an exquisite example of how
one can be good without a god.