Belief in an all-seeing punitive god motivates people to be more charitable towards strangers outside their own family and community, particularly to those of similar beliefs, researchers have found.

A study, published today in Nature, suggests religiosity may contribute to greater cooperation and collaboration despite geographic separation.

"People may trust in, cooperate with and interact fairly within wider social circles, partly because they believe that knowing gods will punish them if they do not," the study's authors wrote.

"Moreover, the social radius within which people are willing to engage in behaviours that benefit others at a cost to themselves may enlarge as gods' powers to monitor and punish increase."

To explore these ideas, researchers studied 591 people from eight diverse communities in Brazil, Mauritius, Siberia, Tanzania, Fiji and Vanuatu.

People in these communities adhere to a wide array of religions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism as well as local traditions such as animism and ancestor worship.

The participants played a game in which they were given the option to exercise financial favouritism towards themselves and their local community, or to be completely impartial by obeying the roll of a die, which could mean giving money to a distant person of the same religion.

Each participant's religious beliefs were also explored through interviews designed to assess how much their god or gods cared about morality, punishment, and how much those knowledge the gods had of individual's behaviour.

The researchers found people who believed in a more punitive, all-knowing god ended up giving more money to distant people who shared the same religious belief.....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-11/fear-of-god-helped-societies-expand-study-finds/7155696
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16980.html