New paper on Divine and Earthly Punishment accepted at ProcB
Our new paper, Outsourcing punishment to god: Beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment (with colleagues Kristin Laurin, Aaron Kay, and Joe Henrich) was just accepted at the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The paper demonstrates how the belief in morally-involved, controlling God, reduces the motivation to punish moral transgressors oneself, and the support for state resources being devoted to punishing criminals. We argue that the belief in these types of supernatural agents allowed humans to ‘outsource’ some degree of their costly punishing duties to God.
Abstract:
The sanctioning of norm-transgressors is a necessary—though often costly—task for maintaining a well-functioning society. Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, which spreads the costs over members of society, large-scale societies would have required that individuals engage in ‘altruistic punishment’—bearing the costs of punishment individually, for the benefit of society. Evolutionary approaches to religion have suggested that beliefs in powerful, moralizing gods, with ample abilities to distribute rewards and punishments, emerged as a way to augment and reinforce earthly punishment in large societies where norm violations could not be effectively monitored. Divine punishment may offer a means to reduce the earthly costs of monitoring and punishment. Empirical evidence for this assertion, however, is lacking. In five studies, using both correlational and experimental paradigms, we investigate whether such god beliefs can replace people’s motivation to engage in altruistic punishment, as well as their support for state-sponsored punishment. Studies 1 and 2 find that, although religiosity generally predicts higher levels of punishment, the specific belief in powerful, intervening gods reduces altruistic punishment. Study 3 broadens the significance of the findings, by showing that these god beliefs also reduce support for state-sponsored punishment. Studies 4 and 4b discount alternative explanations by showing that these effects are specifically due to differences in people’s perceptions that humans are responsible for punishing wrongdoers.