These editorial comments acknowledge those who have contributed to the success of the journal, especially through the transition period and our first year with SAGE. This work also serves as a brief introduction to the special section of manuscripts drawn from keynote speeches and invited addresses given at the 2019 International Association for the Psychology of Religion Conference in Gdańsk, Poland. Every other year, the IAPR hosts a conference. While these gatherings feature a variety of special invited keynote addresses, those (...) remarks are often only available for the edification of attendees. For the first time, we are able to present here, in the journal, the texts of the speeches, suitably revised and expanded. Our goal is to provide a similar record of keynote addresses as they occur at future conferences so that the ideas can stimulate conversation and reflection beyond the moment of presentation. (shrink)

Humans have evolved various social behaviors such as interpersonal motor synchrony, play and sport or religious ritual that bolster group cohesion and facilitate cooperation. While important for small communities, the face-to-face nature of such technologies makes them infeasible in large-scale societies where risky cooperation between anonymous individuals must be enforced through moral judgment and, ultimately, altruistic punishment. However, the unbiased applicability of group norms is often jeopardized by moral hypocrisy, i.e., the application of moral norms in favor of closer subgroup (...) members such as key socioeconomic partners and kin. We investigated whether social behaviors that facilitate close ties between people also promote moral hypocrisy that may hamper large-scale group functioning. We recruited 129 student subjects that either interacted with a confederate in the high synchrony or low synchrony conditions or performed movements alone. Subsequently, participants judged a moral transgression committed by the confederate toward another anonymous student. The results showed that highly synchronized participants judged the confederate’s transgression less harshly than the participants in the other two conditions and that this effect was mediated by the perception of group unity with the confederate. We argue that for synchrony to amplify group identity in large-scale societies, it needs to be properly integrated with morally compelling group symbols that accentuate the group’s overarching identity. Without such contextualization, synchrony may create bonded subgroups that amplify local preferences rather than impartial and wide application of moral norms. (shrink)