Using open data and code of the recent article published by Whitehouse et al. (2019) in Nature, Beheim et al. argue that the detection of beliefs in moralizing gods is crucially dependent on the presence of writing in past societies.
However, assuming the absence of such beliefs pre-writing is at odds with the ethnographic record that documents such beliefs in non-literate societies. Therefore, the sole reliance on writing may bias our conclusions about such beliefs in past societies as well as the related inference on the causal role of these beliefs in increasing societal complexity.
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In a paper published in Religion, Brain & Behavior, J. Nenadalová & D. Řezníček demonstrated that some study participants in a sensory-deprived laboratory environment sensed the presence of another person. This feeling was mostly associated with perceived uncertainty and only somewhat associated with psychological dispositions.
In a cross-national investigation published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, F. M. Saxler with LEVYNA’s E. Kundtová Klocová and other colleagues show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected young people’s normative beliefs about unpaid domestic work; and that this effect is stronger in countries with greater gender inequality.
