The Evolution of Religion and Morality

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). Joseph Henrich currently 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. Ara Norenzayan is professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 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.

1. 1. The evolution of religion and morality: a synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies2. High levels of rule-bending in a minimally religious and largely egalitarian forager population 3. Religion and expanding the cooperative sphere in Kastom and Christian villages on Tanna, Vanuatu 4. Religiosity and resource allocation in Marajó, Brazil 5. Jesus vs. the ancestors: how specific religious beliefs shape prosociality on Yasawa Island, Fiji 6. Buddhism, identity, and class: fairness and favoritism in the Tyva Republic 7. Religion and prosocial behavior among the Indo-Fijians 8. Big Gods in small places: the Random Allocation Game in Mauritius