CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 323Evolutionary Game Theory and CooperationExperimental Behavioral Economics StudiesEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 97 of the 100 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

God’s punishment and public goods: A test of the supernatural punishment hypothesis in 186 world cultures

Johnson, Dominic D. P.·2005·Human Nature
DOI 10.1007/s12110-005-1017-0
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psychology and by anecdotal ethnographic evidence, but formal quantitative tests remain to be done. Using data from 186 societies around the globe, I test whether the likelihood of supernatural punishment-indexed by the importance of moralizing "high gods"-is associated with cooperation.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s12110-005-1017-0

Cites

97 of 97 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

3 of the 100 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. in press The Folk Psychology of Souls.
  2. Divale, W. 2000 Pre-Coded Variables for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, Vols. 1 and 2. New York: York College, CUNY.
  3. Frayser, S. G. 1985 Varieties of Sexual Experience. Pittsburgh: HRAF Press.
  4. Krebs, J. R., and N. B. Davies 1993 An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.
  5. Lang, H. 1998 CONAN: An Electronic Code-Text Data-Base for Cross-Cultural Studies. World Cultures 9:13–56.
  6. 1967 Ethnographic Atlas. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
  7. Peregrine, P. N. 1995a The Birth of the Gods and Replications: Background to the Data and Codes. World Cultures 9:57–64.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 323

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Johnson, D. D. P.
Affiliations
Princeton University (US)
Corresponding author
Johnson, Dominic D. P.
ORCID
Johnson, Dominic D. P.
Venue
Human Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2005-12
Volume
16
Issue
4
Pages
410-446
ISSN
  • 1045-6767 (ISSN-L)
  • 1936-4776
DOI
10.1007/s12110-005-1017-0
OpenAlex
W2004532904
Cited by
323
References
100
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 18 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 23 · 2014: 23 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 17
FWCI
13.36
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
Locations
  • Human Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
Keywords
supernatural punishment, public goods, cooperation, religious beliefs, enforcement costs, cross-cultural comparison, evolution of cooperation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review