Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural (...) survey data from a global sample of 87 countries to show that beliefs about two related sources of supernatural monitoring and punishment — God and the afterlife —independently predict respondents' assessment of the justifiability of a range of moral transgressions. This relationship holds even after controlling for frequency of religious participation, country of origin, religious denomination and level of education. As well as corroborating experimental work, our findings suggest that, across cultural and religious backgrounds, beliefs about the permissibility of moral transgressions are tied to beliefs about supernatural monitoring and punishment, supporting arguments that these beliefs may be important promoters of cooperation in human groups. (shrink)

This study explores the ability of variations in the natural environment to predict variations in the religious-ethical views espoused by different cultural groups. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of William James and Max Weber, it was hypothesized that societies with environmental conditions of potentially life-jeopardizing water scarcity would be significantly more likely to show an elective affinity for a morally concerned Supreme Deity in order to promote the prosocial use of natural resources and contribute to societal survival. To test this (...) hypothesis, a worldwide survey was conducted by using the 186 cultural groups in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. After the influence of missionization was controlled for, the findings confirmed that in societies with a marginally sufficient water supply, a Supreme Deity was significantly more likely to be understood as concerned with, and supportive of, human morality. In contrast, in societies in which water was abundant, the Supreme Deity typically was not concerned with the morality of human behavior. These findings have implications for developing more fruitful understandings of religious environmental ethics. (shrink)

Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psychology and by anecdotal ethnographic evidence, but formal quantitative tests remain to be done. Using data from 186 societies around the globe, I (...) test whether the likelihood of supernatural punishment—indexed by the importance of moralizing “high gods”—is associated with cooperation. (shrink)