The Evolution of Religion and Morality: Volume II

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Martin Lang (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Benjamin Grant Purzycki (Aarhus University, Denmark)

The Evolution of Religion and Morality

Volume II

Martin Lang (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), Benjamin Grant Purzycki (Aarhus University, Denmark), Joseph Henrich (Harvard University, USA) , Ara Norenzayan (University of British Colombia, Canada)

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English

Routledge
06 May 2025

Ethics & moral philosophy; Philosophy of religion; Religion & science

This volume draws on a unique dataset to answer pressing questions about human religiosity. Building upon the first volume in this series, it presents results from the second phase of the Evolution of Religion and Morality (ERM) project.

The second volume investigates key questions in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion and highlights cultural variability and context specificity of diverse religious systems. Chapters draw on a dataset comprising 2,228 participants from 15 ethnographically diverse societies that stretch from Africa and India through Oceania to South America, and include hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, subsistence farmers and wage laborers. Four chapters using the full dataset answer the following questions:

What are the general predictors of commitment to supernatural agents? Is there a gender gap in religiosity? Does belief in punitive gods facilitates cooperation? Are supernatural agents implicitly associated with moral concerns?

Chapters from individual field sites further explore the distinction between moralizing and local gods, the potentially disruptive role of belief in local gods on cooperation with anonymous co-religionists, and the relationship between belief in moralizing gods, cooperation, and differential access to material resources. Above these empirical studies, the book also includes an informed discussion with specialists on the challenges of running such a large cross-cultural project and gives concrete recommendations for future projects.

The Evolution of Religion and Morality: Volume II will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of religious studies, human evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, the cultural evolution of religion and the sociology of religion. This book was originally published as a special issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior.

Edited by: Martin Lang (Masaryk University Czech Republic), Benjamin Grant Purzycki (Aarhus University, Denmark), Joseph Henrich (Harvard University, USA), Ara Norenzayan (University of British Colombia, Canada)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 246mm, Width: 174mm,
Weight: 470g
ISBN: 9781032624082
ISBN 10: 1032624086
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 06 May 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Martin Lang is Assistant Professor at LEVYNA: Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. His work focuses on the question of whether and how religious beliefs and behaviours facilitate cooperation. Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor at Aarhus University’s Department of the Study of Religion, Denmark. His books include Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics (with Richard Sosis, 2022) and The Minds of Gods: New Horizons in the Naturalistic Study of Religion (with Theiss Bendixen, 2023). Ara Norenzayan is Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published widely on the evolutionary origins of religion, and the psychology of religious diversity in today’s globalized world. He is the author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Joseph Henrich is Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. His research deploys evolutionary theory to understand how human psychology gives rise to cultural evolution and how this has shaped our species’ genetic evolution. His most recent book is The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.