In order to explore the evolution of mutually beneficial transactions in large societies, this experimental study gathered data on the way people in societies of different subsistence types played games simulating interactions with anonymous others. The degree of fairness displayed by different players was correlated with measures of large-scale institutions, such as a market or world religion, that were present in a player’s society. Results suggest that “modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history” (1480).

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 draws from anthropology, psychology, and history to gain insight into the causes of large-scale psychological variation among humans. The authors of this study are mainly concerned with the way that weak kinship structures induced by policies of the Western Church in Europe may have resulted in the modern "WEIRD" (an acronym for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic") psychological profiles in that same region. By correlating the amount of contact with the Western Church, rates of cross-cousin marriage (as an element of kin tightness), and degrees of individualism (as an element of WEIRD psychology), the authors are able to find support for this theory.

In this two-part study, researchers first collect data from 600 people from 8 different societies in an effort to examine the character of morality cross-culturally. In the second part, participants play a game to detect honesty and responses are related to conception of morality and religious beliefs. Researchers posit that there is a cooperative nature to conception of morality and that moral culture is related to impact upon one's social life, but that this conceptualization of morality only weakly predicts cooperative behavio. The religious beliefs are stronger predictors.

Considerable disagreement exists in regard to the origin and distribution of economic phenomena such as money, slavery, markets, exchange, and imbalanced transfers. Here the author utilizes a worldwide cross-cultural sample of 60 pre-industrial "societies" to empirically test many economic hypotheses, with a focus on distributional mechanisms and institutions.

This article examines the relationship between population size (and complexity) and the level of third-party punishment in economic games. Results demonstrate that people in larger, more complex societies engage in significantly more third-party punishment than people in small-scale societies.

Inter-group variation is greater in humans than in any other animal, and scholars continue to debate the cause of this diversity. Two competing explanatory models of human variation emphasize either (1) ecological differences and "evoked" culture or (2) population-level effects of cultural transmission. The former emphasizes mechanisms that operate within a single generation, while the latter emphasizes cumulative cultural history operating over many generations. To test these competing models, the authors measured the relative power of ecological variables as compared to culture history to predict behavioral variation in 172 western North American tribes. Culture history is subdivided into culture phylogeny (based on language phylogeny) and spatial distance.

This study examined the relationship between market integration and generalized prosocial behavior. The authors review theory suggesting that market integration fosters cooperation and fairness in dealing with strangers, and they investigate whether child training for generosity, honesty, and trust are associated with level of market integration among societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Results do not indicate an association.

This study examines costly punishment behavior across cultures. Authors conducted economic games in a variety of societies and found that costly punishment behavior occurs to varied degrees across cultures. Results also suggest that altruistic behavior is associated with costly punishment behavior.

Researchers review the literature on the development and spread of prosocial religions and their relations to cooperative behavior, solidarity, societal size, and cultural evolution. They theorize that prosocial religions have been co-beneficially related to the development of successful large-scale cooperative societies, and the reproduction of cultural values.