Fear of god explains spread of human cooperation
Thu Feb 11 2016 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Fear of god explains spread of human cooperation
11 February 2016
The rise of widespread cooperation among large human groups has puzzled scholars for centuries but now scientists think they may have identified a key factor: fear of punishment by an all-seeing, all-knowing god.
A new study across six countries by a team of international scientists including Associate Professor Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, has found people who believe their god is more punitive and knowledgeable behave more honestly and generously towards others who share their religion.
The research, across eight geographically and socially diverse communities from Brazil, Siberia, Tanzania, Vanuatu, Fiji and Mauritius, explored religious attitudes among 591 participants using behavioural economic games and ethnographic interviews. The games included elements of random chance and the ability to skew results to benefit either the player, other individuals or groups.
Communities involved in the research included hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, herders and farmers, and modern economies where people earned wages or ran businesses.
Participants’ beliefs were diverse, ranging from Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism to more localised beliefs in spirits and deities including celestial deities, saints and ancestors, garden spirits and ghosts.
The study found that participants who rated their gods highly as all-knowing and concerned with moral behaviour allocated more money to people who believed in the same god, even if their co-believers were strangers from another community.
The same was not true for shared beliefs in local spirits and deities not considered so all-knowing or concerned with moral behaviour.
“The relatively dramatic rise in human cooperation since the advent of agriculture isn’t explained by genetic evolution,” Dr Atkinson says.
“It turns out that putting the fear of god into us may have had a lot to do with it.
“These gods acted as a kind of social engineering so that people who believed in a morally-concerned god were more likely to follow the rules of the game and give money to their fellow believers over themselves and their village.”
The research, published in Nature, is the largest and most wide-ranging study of its type. The relationship between supernatural beliefs and cooperativeness could not be accounted for by a wide range of other variables such as gender, age, education, material insecurity and number of children.
Dr Atkinson conducted his research as part of work funded through a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to examine the evolution of culture. His ongoing fieldwork is with the people of Tanna island in Vanuatu.
The research is available at: http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature16980
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