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Data, Materials, and Software Availability: All study data are included in the article and/or supporting information available online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220124120#supplementary-materials . Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women’s fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species—including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms. This work was conducted as a part of the “Emergence of Hierarchy and Leadership in Mammalian Societies” group at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, supported by NSF Award DBI-1300426 and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It was supported by NSF awards SMA-1329089 and SMA-1743019, and the Santa Fe Institute, as well as the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture. S.G. was supported by the US Army Research Office grants W911NF-14-1-0637, W911NF-17-1-0150, and the Office of Naval Research grant W911NF-18-1-0138. Additional funding for data collection was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research awards: 8913 and 7970, by NSF awards: BCS-0924630, BCS-0925910, BCS-0848360, BCS-0514559, BCS-0613226, BCS-0827277, SES-9870429, and DDRIG-1357209, by the National Geographic Society awards: HJ-099R-17, 20113909, 8671-09, and 7968-06, by the Kone Foundation awards: 086809, 088423, and 088423, and by the Jacobs Foundation, the UCSB Broom Center for Demography, and the UCSB Department of Anthropology.

Data availability statement: All data and code to reproduce the present study are available at: https://github.com/tbendixen/cross-cultural-free-list-project. The main project repository including raw data, full protocols, and related materials is available at: https://github.com/bgpurzycki/Evolution-of-Religion-and-Morality . The file available on this institutional repository is a preprint available on PsyArXiv at https://psyarxiv.com/tjn3e/. It has not been certified by peer review. We recommend you consult the version of record published by Routledge at https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2023.2178487. How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the content of freely-listed data about gods’ concerns collected from individuals across eight diverse field sites and contextualize these beliefs in their respective cultural milieus. In our analysis, we find that local deities’ concerns point to costly threats to local coordination and cooperation. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative approaches to religious beliefs and appeals fare in light of our results and close by considering some key implications for the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium, funded by a SSHRC partnership grant and the John Templeton Foundation (awarded to A.N. and J.H.); B.G.P. acknowledges support from the Max Planck Society; T.B. and B.G.P. acknowledge generous support from the 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