In this study, the authors inspect the relationship between religion, morality, and cooperation by examining the extent to which people associate their deities with moral concern. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, they find that on average, people tend to ascribe at least some moral concern to their deities, and this effect is stable even after controlling for the influence of explicitly moralistic deities that these societies also worship. The authors also find that ratings of moral concern are not necessarily very high, even for deities that are typically considered to be moralistic, and that there is individual-level variation in the degree of moral concern attributed to deities. In addition, there is an individual-level correlation between how morally interested two selected deities are conceived to be and that being male or more educated decreases the likelihood of associating deities with moral concern. These findings challenge the longstanding belief that belief in moralistic deities is unique to certain societies or religions and instead suggest that the association between deities and moral concern is more widespread and variable, and suggest that the moral character of gods may be tied to cooperation within societies.

Does belief in moralizing and punitive gods promote sociality between coreligionists who are otherwise strangers? A recent dataset of behavioral economic experiment results and demographic and religious data among eight disparate populations allows the researchers to test their hypothesis of a positive association between deity's perceived interest in human morality and favorability of treatment of outsiders who share a religion. Their findings mostly support this hypothesis, which they suggest lends credibility to a theory in which religion encourages cooperation between large groups of people, and is thus a successful product of cultural evolution.

How do educational attainment and food insecurity shape individual religiosity? The material insecurity hypothesis of religion claims that in conditions of material insecurity, individual religiosity will increase. However, through a cross-cultural analysis of 14 societies, the authors of this article find that formal education and food insecurity do not have a significant effect on religiosity.

Researchers tested the popular identity fusion theory, which states that while maintaining one’s own individual identity, a deep affinity with one’s group can contribute to sacrifice for that group, in conjunction with their own hypotheses, using a behavior economic experiment. The experiment looked at whether after rolling a die to determine which cup a coin was placed into, participants actually followed the rules, or favored themselves (by putting the coin into their own cups at a disproportionate rate). The findings state that while on average, the individual participants did indeed favor themselves, those with higher ingroup fusion were more likely to sacrifice coins to other members of their ‘ingroup.' The experiments were conducted in 8 culturally diverse field sites.

In this paper, the author argues that moral systems evolved as a way to enforce cooperation between people outside of kin groups. Because cooperation within kin groups has apparent adaptive advantages, it is argued that these moral systems will be less important for societies with tight kin groups and conversely more important for those with looser kin groups. In order to test this theory, the author creates an original model that incorporates both ethnographic data and data from contemporary countries. Thus, it is postulated that historical kinship practices will influence contemporary systems. The paper concludes that there is sufficient historical evidence for this theory.

Researchers tackle the moral gods hypothesis which proposes that moral gods enabled large-scale societies to evolve. They use 414 societies spanning 10,000 years in Seshat: Global History Databank and code 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of moral gods. The findings of the present study challenge the moral gods hypothesis. In the societies studied, complex societies appear to precede moral gods rather than the inverse of moral gods preceding complex societies.

Stark attempts to resituate Tylor's formulation of religion by calling into question Swanson's (1960) and Peregrine's (1996) findings that supernatural sanctions and moral behavior are consistently correlated in small-scale societies. Positing that Swanson's correlations were confounded by variables related to cultural complexity, Stark tests the association of presence of moralizing Gods with cultural complexity explicitly, as well as measures of morality in various nations as provided by the World Values Survey (1990-1991). The robust correlations across cultures noted below, as well as cross-national findings, provide support for the researcher's theory that it is particular conceptions of God rather than participation in rites and rituals which empower religion to sustain complex moral culture.

This study examines the role of schooling in socialization processes and cultural complexity, seeking to understand whether schooling is correlated with these variables and/or affects them. The author concludes that school serves as a socializer for young children, a skill developer for older children, and a homogenizing force on societal child-rearing practices.

This study examines the relationship between disequilibrium and cognitive development using measurements of child-rearing, presence of high gods, and games of strategy.

This article hypothesizes that ritual ecstasy was selected for as a way for hunter-gatherers to cope with resource uncertainty by unifying separate groups. Results support this hypothesis and suggest a relationship between resource stress and deities as well as dependence on animals and presence of zoomorphic deities.