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Research transparency and reproducibility: Pre-registration materials, supplementary analyses and plots, as well as data and analysis scripts for this study are openly available at: https://github.com/tbendixen/moral-freelist-econ . Supplementary material: Supplemental materials are available at https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.15 . Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods’ moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behaviour. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods. ‘The Emergence of Prosocial Religions’ from the John Templeton Foundation, and the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium, funded by a generous partnership grant (895-2011-1009) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; CH and SM were funded by the John Templeton Foundation grant no. 48952; TB, ADL and BGP acknowledge funding from Aarhus University Research Foundation.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006287. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we conducted a systematic cross-cultural test (N = 1820; 14 societies) of the relationship between material insecurity (indexed by food insecurity) and religious commitment (indexed by both beliefs and practices). Moreover, we examined the relationship between material security and individuals’ commitment to two types of deities (moralistic and local), thus providing the first simultaneous test of the existential security hypothesis across co-existing traditions. Our results indicate that while material insecurity is associated with greater commitment to moralistic deities, it predicts less commitment to local deity traditions.

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that local deities are concerned with punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect is stable even after holding constant the effects of beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally interested. There is no evidence to suggest that this effect is due to direct missionary contact. We posit that the “moralization bias of gods’ minds” is part of a widespread but variable religious phenotype, and a candidate mechanism that contributes to the well-recognized association between religion and cooperation. The Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) was supported by a SSHRC partnership grant (#895-2011-1009) and the John Templeton Foundation (grant ID 40603). BGP and CTR acknowledge support from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and BGP acknowledges support from the Consequences of Formal Education for Science and Religion Project grant that was funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Issachar Fund.

Authors: Shelby Weathers*, Duncan Stibbard Hawkes, Endeko Endeko, Ibrahim Mabulla, and Coren Apicella *Corresponding Author When generating a mental image — recalling a memory or imagining a future event — one may visualize the scene in first-person or third-person perspective. Research on perspective in mental imagery has been conducted primarily with undergraduates in Western and East Asian rich, industrialized countries with high levels of media exposure and universal participation in education. However, recent work with rural communities has demonstrated that technological exposure can alter self-perception (Thornborrow, et. al., 2022). This study explores whether the Hadza, a mixed subsistence population in Tanzania who have relatively little exposure to photos, videos, and mirrors, show patterns in perspective when visualizing the past that differ from the current literature, and whether exposure to formal education alongside the accompanying increased exposure to both pictographic and other visual media is related to a change in visual perspective in mental imagery among the Hadza. Previous work on perspective in mental imagery has demonstrated that taking a third-person perspective can increase intentions to engage in cooperative behaviors such as voting (Libby et al., 2007), recycling (Zhang et al., 2021), and interacting with a member of a stigmatized group (Crisp & Husnu, 2011). An additional aim of this study is to investigate whether there is a relationship between the perspective an individually naturally uses in recall and their tendency for cooperative behavior. References Crisp, R. J., & Husnu, S. (2011). Attributional processes underlying imagined contact effects. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 14(2), 275–287. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430210390721 Libby, L. K., Shaeffer, E. M., Eibach, R. P., & Slemmer, J. A. (2007). Picture Yourself at the Polls: Visual Perspective in Mental Imagery Affects Self-Perception and Behavior. Psychological Science, 18(3), 199–203. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01872.x Thornborrow, T., Evans, E. H., Tovee, M. J., & Boothroyd, L. G. (2022). Sociocultural drivers of body image and eating disorder risk in rural Nicaraguan women. Journal of Eating Disorders, 10(1), 1-16. Zhang, J., Zhao, L., & Hu, S. (2021). Visualizing recycling: Promoting recycling through mental simulation. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 174, 105783. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.105783