When god is watching: dictator game results from the Sursurunga of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

ABSTRACT The influence of religious beliefs on social complexity is a fairly straightforward account. The possibility of social life beyond a face-to-face community exists when supernaturally sanctioned prosocial moral norms include an expanding circle of humanity—that is, when non-kin are treated as kin. This paper describes an effort to gain a clearer picture of the ways in which belief in a moralistic deity affects people’s behavior toward others, including distant coreligionists and faraway strangers, using Dictator Game (DG) play among the Sursurunga of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The DG experiments employed two conditions: a Local God condition and a Big God condition. Two predictions were made about the recipients of greater allocations of money in the Big God condition: (1) a distant coreligionist over a member of one’s kin group, and (2) a faraway stranger over a distant coreligionist. A final prediction was that (3) all allocations to oneself would be lower in the Big God condition than in the Local God condition. Only predictions (2) and (3) were supported by the results. An unexpected and surprising outcome was that after playing DG, participants who kept more for themselves tended to view God as less moralistic and less punitive.