Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures.

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites.

Adaptive narratives and fantastical falsehoods?

Johnson et al. make a strong case for Conviction Narrative Theory, but it remains unclear why so many adaptive narratives include supernatural causes and other falsehoods. Focusing on religions, I argue that an adaptive decision-making system might include supernatural falsehoods because they simplify complex problems, they are sensitive to long-term incentives, and they evoke strong emotions in a communicative context.

Homo medicus: The transition to meat eating increased pathogen pressure and the use of pharmacological plants in Homo.

The human lineage transitioned to a more carnivorous niche 2.6 mya and evolved a large body size and slower life history, which likely increased zoonotic pathogen pressure. Evidence for this increase includes increased zoonotic infections in modern hunter-gatherers and bushmeat hunters, exceptionally low stomach pH compared to other primates, and divergence in immune-related genes.

All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities.

Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness.

Middle-earth wasn't built in a day: How do we explain the costs of creating a world?

Dubourg and Baumard explain why fictional worlds are attractive to consumers. A complete account of fictional worlds, however, should also explain why some people them. Creation is a costly and time-consuming process that does not resemble exploration but does resemble the culturally universal phenomenon of knowledge specialization.

Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures.

People everywhere acquire high levels of conceptual knowledge about their social and natural worlds, which we refer to as . Evolutionary explanations for expertise are still widely debated. We analysed ethnographic text records ( = 547) describing ethnoscientific expertise among 55 cultures in the Human Relations Area Files to investigate the mutually compatible roles of collaboration, proprietary knowledge, cultural transmission, honest signalling, and mate provisioning.

Acculturation and market integration are associated with greater trust among Tanzanian Maasai pastoralists.

Acting on socially learned information involves risk, especially when the consequences imply certain costs with uncertain benefits. Current evolutionary theories argue that decision-makers evaluate and respond to this information based on context cues, such as prestige (the ) and/or incentives (the ). We tested the roles of each in explaining trust using a preregistered vignette-based study involving advice about livestock among Maasai pastoralists.

Correction to 'Radical framing effects in the ultimatum game: the impact of explicit culturally transmitted frames on economic decision-making'.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170543.

Radical framing effects in the ultimatum game: the impact of explicit culturally transmitted frames on economic decision-making.

Many studies have documented framing effects in economic games. These studies, however, have tended to use minimal framing cues (e.g.

Mapping the terra incognita of economic cognition will require an experimental paradigm that incorporates context.

Researchers, including Boyer & Petersen (B&P), commonly use experimental economic studies to draw their conclusions. These studies conventionally strip away context and present participants only with abstract rules. Because context is a strictly necessary component of the decision-making process, it is not clear that inferences about high-level folk psychological concepts (e.