People are nicer to each other when they think someone is watching, many psychology studies have shown—especially if they believe that someone has the power to punish them for transgressions even after they’re dead. That’s why some scientists think that belief in the high gods of moralizing religions, such as Islam and Christianity, helped people cooperate with each other and encouraged societies to grow. An innovative study of 96 societies in the Pacific now suggests that a culture might not need to believe in omniscient, moral gods in order to reap the benefits of religion in the form of political complexity. All they need is the threat of supernatural punishment, even if the deities in question don’t care about morality and act on personal whims, the new work concludes.
People raised in Western cultures find the idea of moralizing high gods—so-called big gods such as the Abrahamic god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—“really intuitive, and think that they are a common feature of religion, whereas really they’re not,” says Joseph Watts, a doctoral student in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Gods in small-scale societies are “a lot more like humans,” he says. Think of the ancient Greek gods, with their romantic entanglements, material concerns, and arbitrary biases, for example.
