Does belief in moralizing and punitive gods promote sociality between coreligionists who are otherwise strangers? A recent dataset of behavioral economic experiment results and demographic and religious data among eight disparate populations allows the researchers to test their hypothesis of a positive association between deity's perceived interest in human morality and favorability of treatment of outsiders who share a religion. Their findings mostly support this hypothesis, which they suggest lends credibility to a theory in which religion encourages cooperation between large groups of people, and is thus a successful product of cultural evolution.

This article is a quantitative analysis of 592 participants from 8 societies. The study examines a number of theories about what predicts moralistic religions, including life history theory. Findings suggest that there is no evident relationship between these life history predictions and the religious beliefs regarding moralism.

Researchers tested the popular identity fusion theory, which states that while maintaining one’s own individual identity, a deep affinity with one’s group can contribute to sacrifice for that group, in conjunction with their own hypotheses, using a behavior economic experiment. The experiment looked at whether after rolling a die to determine which cup a coin was placed into, participants actually followed the rules, or favored themselves (by putting the coin into their own cups at a disproportionate rate). The findings state that while on average, the individual participants did indeed favor themselves, those with higher ingroup fusion were more likely to sacrifice coins to other members of their ‘ingroup.' The experiments were conducted in 8 culturally diverse field sites.