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Resource Stress Predicts Changes in Religious Belief and Increases in Sharing Behavior

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Abstract

We examine and test alternative models for explaining the relationships between resource stress, beliefs that gods and spirits influence weather (to help or harm food supply or punish for norm violations), and customary beyond-household sharing behavior. Our model, the resource stress model, suggests that resource stress affects both sharing as well as conceptions of gods’ involvement with weather, but these supernatural beliefs play no role in explaining sharing. An alternative model, the moralizing high god model, suggests that the relationship between resource stress and sharing is at least partially mediated by religious beliefs in moralizing high gods. We compared the models using a worldwide sample of 96 cultures from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), newly coded data on supernatural involvement with weather, and previously coded data on food and labor sharing. We conducted three types of analysis: multilevel and society-level regressions, and mediational path modeling using Monte Carlo simulations. Resource stress shows a robust effect on beliefs that high gods are associated with weather (and the more specific beliefs that high gods help or hurt the food supply with weather), that superior gods help the food supply through weather, and that minor spirits hurt the food supply through weather. Resource stress also predicts greater belief in moralizing high gods. However, no form of high god belief that we test significantly predicts more sharing. Mediational models suggest the religious beliefs do not significantly explain why resource stress is associated with food and labor sharing. Our findings generally accord with the view that resource stress changes religious belief and has a direct effect on sharing behavior, unmediated by high god beliefs.

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Notes

  1. We follow Ember and Ember (1992b) in using reliability scores of 5 or less for resource stress measures. We also excluded two societies—Hebrews and Babylonians—that did not have information on sharing from Ember et al. (2018).

  2. In response to reviewers’ comments, we subsequently reviewed the ethnographic evidence for Murdock’s (1967) codes on high gods to see if we were in agreement. After this review we removed one case (Koreans) for which there was contradictory information. The Database of Religious History (DRH) (https://religiondatabase.org/landing/) was also used for reviewing the presence or absence of high gods.

  3. D-PLACE (https://d-place.org/) was used for cases not found in Murdock (1967).

  4. Although the temporal ordering of moral high gods and complexity is controversial (Beheim et al. 2019; Slingerland et al. 2019; Whitehouse et al. 2019), there is broad agreement that complexity and moral high gods are correlated.

  5. In our first set of models, religious belief variables were predictors and resource stress was an outcome. Models were organized in this way because dependent variables in multilevel models must vary at each level of analysis.

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Acknowledgments

IS and CC conceived and designed the experiments. IS, CC, and EP collected and coded the data. EP and JCJ analyzed the data. CRE, EP, and JCJ contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools. IS, CRE, EP, and JCJ wrote and revised the paper. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number SMA-1416651 awarded to the Human Relations Area Files for the research project titled “IBSS: Natural Hazards and Cultural Transformations.” We thank the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

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  1. Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, 755 Prospect St, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Ian Skoggard, Carol R. Ember & Emily Pitek

  2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Joshua Conrad Jackson

  3. Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Christina Carolus

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Skoggard, I., Ember, C.R., Pitek, E. et al. Resource Stress Predicts Changes in Religious Belief and Increases in Sharing Behavior. Hum Nat 31, 249–271 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09371-8

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