eprintid: 50594 rev_number: 9 eprint_status: archive userid: 1482 importid: 105 dir: disk0/00/05/05/94 datestamp: 2025-03-07 08:09:11 lastmod: 2025-03-07 08:10:57 status_changed: 2025-03-07 08:09:11 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Fitouchi, Léo creators_name: Singh, Manvir creators_name: André, Jean-Baptiste creators_name: Baumard, Nicolas creators_id: leo.fitouchi@iast.fr creators_idrefppn: 282466703 creators_idrefppn: 255915365 creators_idrefppn: 204171806 creators_idrefppn: 149206372 creators_halaffid: 1002422 creators_halaffid: 506116 title: Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing ispublished: pub subjects: subjects_ECO abstract: Why do humans believe in moralizing gods? Leading accounts argue that these beliefs evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that beliefs in moralizing gods are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that beliefs in moralizing gods develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve strategic goals in within-group interactions. People have a strategic interest in controlling others’ cooperation, either to extort benefits from them or to gain reputational benefits for protecting the public good. Moreover, they believe, based on their folk-psychology, that others would be less likely to cheat if they feared supernatural punishment. Thus, people endorse beliefs in moralizing gods to manipulate others into cooperating. Prosocial religions emerge from a dynamic of mutual monitoring, in which each individual, lacking confidence in the cooperativeness of conspecifics, attempts to incentivize others’ cooperation by endorsing beliefs in supernatural punishment. We show how variations of this incentive structure explain the variety of cultural attractors toward which supernatural punishment converges, including extractive religions that extort benefits from exploited individuals, prosocial religions geared toward mutual benefit, and forms of prosocial religion where belief in moralizing gods is itself a moral duty. We review evidence for nine predictions of this account and use it to explain the decline of prosocial religions in modern societies. Supernatural punishment beliefs seem endorsed as long as people believe them necessary to ensure others’ cooperation, regardless of their objective effectiveness in doing so. date: 2025-02-10 date_type: published publisher: American Psychological Association id_number: 10.1037/rev0000531 official_url: http://tse-fr.eu/pub/130420 faculty: tse divisions: tse language: en has_fulltext: FALSE doi: 10.1037/rev0000531 view_date_year: 2025 full_text_status: none publication: Psychological Review place_of_pub: Washington refereed: TRUE issn: 0033-295X oai_identifier: oai:tse-fr.eu:130420 harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: note harvester_local_overwrite: date harvester_local_overwrite: issn harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: creators_halaffid harvester_local_overwrite: publisher harvester_local_overwrite: creators_id harvester_local_overwrite: place_of_pub harvester_local_overwrite: id_number harvester_local_overwrite: hal_id harvester_local_overwrite: hal_version harvester_local_overwrite: hal_url harvester_local_overwrite: hal_passwd harvester_local_overwrite: publish_to_hal oai_lastmod: 2025-03-06T15:02:20Z oai_set: tse site: ut1 publish_to_hal: TRUE hal_id: hal-04981251 hal_passwd: sytycqj hal_version: 1 hal_url: https://hal.science/hal-04981251 citation: Fitouchi, LéoIdRef , Singh, ManvirIdRef , André, Jean-BaptisteIdRef and Baumard, NicolasIdRef (2025) Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing. Psychological Review.