The goal of this project is to explore the role belief in culturally evolving supernatural agents plays in stabilizing non-kin cooperation in large-scale societies. With the rise of food production, cultural evolutionary forces increasingly favored societal mechanisms that permitted populations to scale-up in size, complexity and the extent of cooperation. Specialization and transportation led to increased trade, as exchange increasingly included strangers and those well outside people’s communities, ethnic groups or social networks. Here, as one of these societal mechanisms, we propose that belief in increasingly morally concerned gods (MGs) harnessed a variety of human mental mechanisms, including those related to reputation and punishment, to promote mutual cooperation in situations where reciprocity, signaling, and kin mechanisms are not sufficient.
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