English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: a cross-cultural investigation

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons144546

Atkinson,  Quentin       
Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Baimel_Material_RelBrBeh_2022.pdf
(Publisher version), 3MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Baimel, A., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Bolyanatz, A., Cohen, E., Handley, C., et al. (2022). Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: a cross-cultural investigation. Religion, Brain Behavior, 12(1-2), 4-17. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006287.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000A-560C-9
Abstract
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism,
polytheism, and monotheism, we conducted a systematic cross-cultural test (N = 1820; 14 societies) of the relationship between material insecurity (indexed by food insecurity) and religious commitment
(indexed by both beliefs and practices). Moreover, we examined the relationship between material security and individuals’ commitment to two types of deities (moralistic and local), thus providing the first
simultaneous test of the existential security hypothesis across co-existing traditions. Our results indicate that while material insecurity is associated with greater commitment to moralistic deities, it predicts less
commitment to local deity traditions.