Religion, morality, evolution.

How did religion evolve? What effect does religion have on our moral beliefs and moral actions? These questions are related, as some scholars propose that religion has evolved to enhance altruistic behavior toward members of one's group. I review here data from survey studies (both within and across countries), priming experiments, and correlational studies of the effects of religion on racial prejudice. I conclude that religion has powerfully good moral effects and powerfully bad moral effects, but these are due to aspects of religion that are shared by other human practices. There is surprisingly little evidence for a moral effect of specifically religious beliefs.

[1]  M. Shermer.  How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science , 2003 .

[2]  S. Guthrie,et al.  Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion , 1994 .

[3]  Robert Boyd,et al.  Group beneficial norms can spread rapidly in a structured population. , 2002, Journal of theoretical biology.

[4]  E. Sober,et al.  Adaptation and Natural Selection revisited , 2011, Journal of evolutionary biology.

[5]  Scott S. Wiltermuth,et al.  Synchrony and Cooperation , 2009, Psychological science.

[6]  Gordon P. D. Ingram,et al.  "Princess Alice is watching you": children's belief in an invisible person inhibits cheating. , 2011, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[7]  C. Batson,et al.  Religion and the Individual: A Social-Psychological Perspective , 1993 .

[8]  Paul Bloom,et al.  How pleasure works: The new science of why we like what we like. , 2010 .

[9]  J. Graham,et al.  Beyond Beliefs: Religions Bind Individuals Into Moral Communities , 2010, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[10]  Geoffrey L. Cohen,et al.  Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  Penny A Edgell,et al.  Atheists As “Other”: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society , 2006 .

[12]  Daniel N. Finkel,et al.  14 The Socio-religious Brain: A Developmental Model , 2010 .

[13]  J. Bering,et al.  Reasoning about Dead Agents Reveals Possible Adaptive Trends , 2022 .

[14]  Vassilis Saroglou,et al.  Nonconscious influences of religion on prosociality: A priming study , 2007 .

[15]  E. Larson,et al.  Scientists are still keeping the faith , 1997, Nature.

[16]  C. Batson.  Religion as Prosocial: Agent or Double Agent?* , 1976 .

[17]  L. Festinger,et al.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , 2017 .

[18]  E. Larson,et al.  Leading scientists still reject God , 1998, Nature.

[19]  Simon Baron-Cohen,et al.  The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain , 2003 .

[20]  Dacher Keltner,et al.  Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life , 2009 .

[21]  Paul Bloom,et al.  Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science , 2007, Science.

[22]  Dominic D. P. Johnson.  God’s punishment and public goods , 2005, Human nature.

[23]  T. Shackelford,et al.  Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Premature Dismissal of the Religious-Belief Hypothesis , 2010, Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior.

[24]  D. Lamoureux.  The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life , 2012 .

[25]  J. Haidt.  Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion1 , 2009 .

[26]  C. Hitchens.  God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything , 2007 .

[27]  R. Sosis,et al.  Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion , 2003 .

[28]  C. Sedikides,et al.  Religiosity as Self-Enhancement: A Meta-Analysis of the Relation Between Socially Desirable Responding and Religiosity , 2010, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[29]  D. Kelemen.  Are Children “Intuitive Theists”? , 2004, Psychological science.

[30]  L. Cosmides.  The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task , 1989, Cognition.

[31]  Fiona M. Jordan,et al.  Cultural evolution of religion , 2013 .

[32]  A. Norenzayan,et al.  Religion and Support for Suicide Attacks , 2009, Psychological science.

[33]  G. Paul.  Religiosity tied to socioeconomic status. , 2010, Science.

[34]  Jordan P. LaBouff,et al.  Priming Christian Religious Concepts Increases Racial Prejudice , 2010 .

[35]  Peter L. Sheras,et al.  "From Jerusalem to Jericho": A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. , 1973 .

[36]  A. Shariff,et al.  The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality , 2008, Science.

[37]  Kathryn C. Oleson,et al.  Religious prosocial motivation: Is it altruistic or egoistic? , 1989 .

[38]  Paul Bloom,et al.  Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants , 2008, Pediatric Research.

[39]  John Locke,et al.  A Letter Concerning Toleration , 2017, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration.

[40]  J. Bering.  The folk psychology of souls , 2006, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[41]  S. Atran.  In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion , 2002 .

[42]  J. Haidt.  The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. , 2001, Psychological review.

[43]  M. Bateson,et al.  Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting , 2006, Biology Letters.

[44]  T. Chartrand,et al.  The chameleon effect: the perception-behavior link and social interaction. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[45]  Richard A. Shweder,et al.  The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "big three" explanations of suffering. , 1997 .

[46]  Anthony G. Greenwald,et al.  Does the Good Samaritan parable increase helping? A comment on Darley and Batson's no-effect conclusion , 1975 .

[47]  Sam Harris.  The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason , 2004 .

[48]  E. M. Evans.  Imagining the Impossible: Beyond Scopes: Why Creationism Is Here to Stay , 2000 .

[49]  D. Myers.  A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God Is Good and Faith Isn't Evil , 2008 .

[50]  Nina Mazar,et al.  The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance , 2008 .

[51]  R. Sosis,et al.  Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols , 2005, Human nature.

[52]  Wendy Wood,et al.  Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism , 2010, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[53]  M. Persinger,et al.  The neuropsychiatry of paranormal experiences. , 2001, The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences.

[54]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  Ideology Its Resurgence in Social , Personality , and Political Psychology , 2008 .

[55]  P. Rozin,et al.  Religion and the morality of mentality. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[56]  B. Altemeyer,et al.  Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice , 1992 .

[57]  J. Waldron.  Secularism and the Limits of Community , 2010 .

[58]  Robert D. Putnam,et al.  Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community , 2000, CSCW '00.

[59]  Leon Wieseltier.  The God Genome , 2006 .

[60]  A. Shariff,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article God Is Watching You Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game , 2022 .

[61]  W. Irons.  AN EVOLUTIONARY CRITIQUE OF THE CREATED CO‐CREATOR CONCEPT , 2004 .

[62]  S. Pinker.  How the Mind Works , 1999, Philosophy after Darwin.

[63]  G. Āllport,et al.  Some roots of prejudice. , 1946, The Journal of general psychology.

[64]  P. Zuckerman.  Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment , 2008 .

[65]  D. Fessler,et al.  Nobody's watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. , 2005 .

[66]  S. Gould,et al.  The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme , 1979, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences.

[67]  Paul Bloom,et al.  Religion is natural. , 2007, Developmental science.

[68]  G. Āllport.  The Nature of Prejudice , 1954 .

[69]  Scott Atran,et al.  Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[70]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees , 2006, Science.

[71]  E. M. Evans,et al.  Cognitive and Contextual Factors in the Emergence of Diverse Belief Systems: Creation versus Evolution , 2001, Cognitive Psychology.

[72]  P. Bloom.  Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human , 2004 .

[73]  Jaime L. Napier,et al.  The “Antidemocratic Personality” Revisited: A Cross‐National Investigation of Working‐Class Authoritarianism , 2008 .

[74]  Daniel Nettle,et al.  Effects of eye images on everyday cooperative behavior: a field experiment , 2011 .

[75]  G. Paul.  Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies , 2005 .

[76]  Michael D. Nielsen,et al.  Honesty: One Effect of Primed Religious Representations , 2007 .

[77]  J. Bering.  The Existential Theory of Mind , 2002 .

[78]  Dominic D. P. Johnson,et al.  Hand of God, Mind of Man: Punishment and Cognition in the Evolution of Cooperation* , 2006 .

[79]  Introduction: New Frontiers in the Cognitive Science of Religion , 2005 .

[80]  G. Āllport,et al.  Personal religious orientation and prejudice. , 1967, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[81]  David Sloan Wilson,et al.  Evolution for everyone : how Darwin's theory can change the way we think about our lives , 2007 .

[82]  Joseph A. Bulbulia,et al.  The cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion , 2004 .

[83]  George C. Williams,et al.  Adaptation and Natural Selection , 2018 .

[84]  Jonathan D. Lane,et al.  Children's understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds. , 2010, Child development.