Can punitive gods encourage people to cooperate? Getty

Belief in punitive gods may have helped humans cooperate across larger societies by uniting distant populations into a cohesive group.

How humans started to cooperate on large scales is a long-standing question. To see how religions may have played a role, Martin Lang at Harvard University and his colleagues recruited 2228 people from Asia, Africa and South America who practised Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, animism or ancestor worship. There is a wide spectrum of beliefs about the nature of God both within and between these groups.

The participants had to play a game where they were given coins to allocate into two cups. The cups were labelled differently each time they were asked to choose. These labels included themselves, a local of the participant’s own religious group, another member of the same group who lives far away, and a member of a different religion.


When asked to place a coin in one of the two cups, everyone tended to give more coins to themselves or local members of the same religion than to others. But these choices differed depending on how highly each participant rated how punitive they believed their god to be.

For example, in a choice between giving coins to themselves versus a distant person of similar beliefs, people who believed punitive gods had little power over their lives were most likely to take the coin for themselves, while people who believed strongly in punitive gods that had more power were more likely to give it away.

How people play these games is correlated with how people act in the real world, says Lang.

This may mean that belief in a punitive god could make people more willing to share resources across a large society. “Religion created a sense of us versus them and as societies grew into empires that must have been a very important factor in keeping them cohesive,” says Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut.

While the experiments show that punitive gods may influence human cooperation, it may also work the other way around. Turchin says his research into historical societies shows that belief in punitive gods tends to arise after the appearance of large-scale societies.

Today, punitive gods play no role in some highly cooperative societies, he says. “This is because other social technologies play the same role, such as very persuasive bureaucratic control or social control by neighbours.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.0202