Gods, Games, and the Socioecological Landscape

For generations, social scientists have observed important relationships between religion and society, but what explains the variation and persistence we see in the world’s small-scale religious traditions? Are such traditions responses to locally salient threats to cooperation? How do their beliefs and practices contribute to intergroup cooperation? Only a few exceptional case studies have systematically and rigorously detailed how particular religious systems contribute reducing self-interested motivations and encouraging sustained, group-beneficial behaviors in locally specific ways. As a collaborative, iterated ethnographic and experimental venture conducted among relatively isolated cultural groups, this project represents the first organized, quantitative study of traditional religious beliefs and practices, their correspondence to locally salient cooperative dilemmas, and whether they promote cooperative behaviors in these dilemmas. To test the hypothesis that the content and form of traditional religions contribute to cooperation in locally specified ways, we will collect individual-level ethnographic data that surveys the religious landscape of small-scale communities. We will first link that data—particularly in the form of beliefs about spiritual sanctions—to behavioral experiments that measure cooperation. This will allow us to assess whether individual beliefs increase generosity and rule-following. Using this ethnographic data, we will also craft locally relevant experiments to examine religion’s local role in cooperative dilemmas that stem from local economies. For maximal, long-term impact, we will recruit and offer training workshops to aspiring early-career and indigenous field researchers thus contributing to multiple dissertations, reports, and edited volumes, as well as our understanding of why one of humanity’s most cherished institutions exhibits and maintains the variation it has.

See links for more details. For some background reading see:

Bendixen, T., Apicella, C. L., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., Henrich, J., McNamara, R. A., Norenzayan, A., Willard, A. K., Xygalatas, D., and Purzycki, B. G. (forthcoming). Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies. Religion, Brain and Behavior.

Purzycki, B. G., Bendixen, T., Lightner, A. D., and Sosis, R. (2022). Gods, games, and the socioecological landscape. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 3: 100057.

Purzycki, B. G., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., McNamara, R. A., Willard, A. K., Xygalatas, D., Norenzayan, A., and Henrich, J. (2016). Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality. Nature, 530(7590): 327-330.