Tight cultures and vengeful gods: How culture shapes religious belief.

Abstract

Billions of people from around the world believe in vengeful gods who punish immoral behavior. These punitive religious beliefs may foster prosociality and contribute to large-scale cooperation, but little is known about how these beliefs emerge and why people adopt them in the first place. We present a cultural-psychological model suggesting that cultural tightness-the strictness of cultural norms and normative punishment-helps to catalyze punitive religious beliefs by increasing people's motivation to punish norm violators. Our model also suggests that tightness mediates the impact of ecological threat on punitive belief, explaining why punitive religious beliefs are most common in regions with high levels of ecological threat. Five multimethod studies support these predictions. Studies 1-3 focus on the effect of cultural tightness on punitive religious beliefs. Historical increases in cultural tightness precede and predict historical increases in punitive beliefs (Study 1), and both manipulating people's support for tightness (Study 2) and placing people in a simulated tight society (Study 3) increase punitive religious beliefs via the personal motivation to punish norm violators. Studies 4-5 focus on whether cultural tightness mediates the link between ecological threat and punitive religious beliefs.Cultural tightness helps explain why U.S. states with high ecological threat (e.g. natural hazards, scarcity) have the highest levels of punitive religious beliefs (Study 4), and why experimental manipulations of threat increase punitive religious beliefs (Study 5). Past research shows how religion impacts culture, but our studies show how culture can shape religion.

The new science of religious change.

“…Granger causality and vectoral autoregression (VAR) models are more complex because they can model a bivariate relationship while controlling for a variable’s effect on itself (Ding et al, 2006). Jackson and colleagues (in press) used these methods to show that historical increases in cultural tightness preceded and predicted historical increases in punitive religious beliefs.…”

“…Believing in wrathful gods and unforgiving supernatural forces may make people into better citizens, but it does not make them wealthier or safer as individuals. To address this gap, Jackson and colleagues (in press) recently introduced a niche construction model suggesting that people may find punitive gods most appealing in culturally tight societies—societies with strict norms and strong punishments for deviations from norms. In culturally tight societies, people are more sensitive to norm violations (Mu et al, 2015) and are more likely to support authoritarian leaders who promise to enforce law and order (Jackson, van Egmond, et al, 2019).…”

“…Supporting studies show that punitive religious beliefs are most common during culturally tight periods of history (as measured by the frequency of words reflecting restrictiveness in published books; Jackson, Gelfand, et al, 2019) and in culturally tight regions of the world. Priming cultural tightness also increases Christians’ beliefs in punitive qualities of God partly because it makes people more motivated to punish rule-breakers (Jackson et al, in press).…”

“…In particular, research shows that cultural tightness often rises during times of social or ecological threat, such as warfare, pandemics, or natural hazards, and so it is possible that punitive beliefs are also most common in highly threatened areas of the world. Several studies now show that regions with high levels of natural disasters have the most punitive religious beliefs (Botero et al, 2014; Caluori et al, 2020; Zuckerman et al, 2018), and priming ecological threat increases people’s punitive religious beliefs via their support for greater cultural tightness (Jackson et al, in press). Together with group selection models, these studies suggest that people may first adopt punitive religious beliefs because they are appealing during times of environmental threat and cultural tightness, and punitive religious beliefs might persist and spread because they make societies more cooperative.…”

The spatial representation of leadership depends on ecological threat: A replication and extension of Menon et al. (2010).

“…Our choice of North Korea as political enemy of the US in the high threat condition was guided by previous research(Jackson et al, 2021). Any other non-Asian country could have been chosen instead of North Korea.…”