Abstract
A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, beliefs and behaviors. The bulk of this research, however, draws from coded qualitative ethnographies rather than from standardized methods specifically designed to measure religious beliefs and behaviors. Psychological data sets that examine religious thought and behavior in controlled conditions tend to be disproportionately sampled from student populations. Some cross-national databases employ standardized methods at the individual level, but are primarily focused on fully market integrated, state-level societies. The Evolution of Religion and Morality Project sought to generate a data set that systematically probed individual level measures sampling across a wider range of human populations. The set includes data from behavioral economic experiments and detailed surveys of demographics, religious beliefs and practices, material security, and intergroup perceptions. This paper describes the methods and variables, briefly introduces the sites and sampling techniques, notes inconsistencies across sites, and provides some basic reporting for the data set.
Highlights
Background and SummaryAs the evolutionary sciences of religion and cooperation mature, there is a greater need for rich, comparative ethnographic and cross-cultural psychological research that draws on evidence going beyond samples of university students, or dated, qualitative ethnographic or state-based datasets to test hypotheses[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Our international team came together to design and execute a large cross-cultural study to examine a range of contemporary concerns in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion, with particular focus on whether and how religion contributes to the expansion of prosocial behavior
Dubbed the ‘Evolution of Religion and Morality Project’, this team sought to provide the foundations for similar, future research and ensured that data, methodological protocols, and analytical scripts are publicly available to researchers
Summary
As the evolutionary sciences of religion and cooperation mature, there is a greater need for rich, comparative ethnographic and cross-cultural psychological research that draws on evidence going beyond samples of university students, or dated, qualitative ethnographic or state-based datasets to test hypotheses[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Cultural evolutionary theory predicts that this process is gradual, and that increasingly punitive, moralistic, and knowledgeable gods will coevolve with and contribute to the expansion of fairness and moral behavior toward coreligionist strangers[14,23,34]. We draw much of this article from the Supplementary Materials of our recent report in Nature[11] where readers can find further details and analyses
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