LEVYNA conducted field research in Mauritius
In everyday life, humans must constantly make decisions whom to trust and with whom to cooperate. But how can people recognize reliable cooperative partners?
In our new paper published in Evolutionary Psychology, we hypothesized that participants will choose as cooperative partners people who display markers of religious commitment. Since religions have been known to regulate cooperation by imposing norms and moral obligations on their members, signaling commitment to such norms by adoring religious badges may effectively help to find reliable cooperative partners.
In our experimental manipulation in Mauritius, we photoshopped religious badges (Hindu and Christian) on some pre-selected faces and let participants to choose faces for cooperative exchange in an economic game. We found that while faces adoring religious badges were trusted more on average, this effect held only for faces that displayed commitment to religions congruent with participants' affiliation. This is in contrast with previous studies on US undergraduate samples that find religious badges increase trust even across religious divides. Find more in the full article: https://journals.sagepub.com/…/full/10.1177/1474704918817644.
In a new study published in Human Nature, LEVYNA was part of a team lead by A.K. Willard, studying how witchcraft beliefs affect social norms and behaviors. Specifically, researchers investigated whether witchcraft is regarded to be motivated by envy and how this notion influences community interactions. The findings show that, while witchcraft accusations were common, they were mostly directed at persons suspected of acting out of envy.