August 22, 2017
Professor Henrich and his colleagues in the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) recently produced a special issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior (in press) on the evolution of religion and morality. The issue contains a synthetic article detailing CERC's large, cross-cultural study on the prosocial effects of belief in moralizing, punishing gods, as well as seven additional papers focused on each individual field site (Purzycki et al., 2017). The first round of results from this study were published in Nature in 2016 (Purzycki et. al, 2016), and were widely covered in the press (e.g. by Nature News & Views, WIRED magazine, The Washington Post, & LA Times). Post-doctoral fellow Martin Lang also has an article in this issue, reporting the prosocial effects of belief in a moralizing god and participation in high-intensity rituals in Mauritian Hindus (Xygalatas et al., 2017).