What explains the ubiquity and cultural success of prosocial religions? Leading accounts
argue that prosocial religions evolved because they help societies grow and promote group …

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 …

Establishing whether Big Gods helped drive the cultural evolution of large-scale cooperation
requires the synthesis of multiple lines of evidence. Survey data and labbased studies …

Cooperation for the public good is vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders because it always
pays individuals to exploit the social contract for their own benefit. This problem can be …

I address three common empirical questions about the connection between religion and
morality:(1) Do religious beliefs and practices shape moral behavior?(2) Do all religions …

Establishing whether Big Gods helped drive the cultural evolution of large-scale cooperation
requires the synthesis of multiple lines of evidence. Survey data and labbased studies …

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in
punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there …

Establishing whether Big Gods helped drive the cultural evolution of large-scale cooperation
requires the synthesis of multiple lines of evidence. Survey data and labbased studies …

Cooperation in human societies is difficult to sustain if mechanisms are not in place to
monitor behavior and sanction transgressions. Unfortunately, these mechanisms constitute …

Our thesis is that intensifications in human religiosity (particularly, an increasing focus on
supernatural entities that (1) monitor human behavior for moral probity and moral lapses,(2) …