Belief that God punishes reduces people’s willingness to punish wrongdoers themselves.

Evidence

There is more evidence that the action is in the fear of supernatural punishment. The promise of supernatural benevolence, if anything, backfires as a tool to curb antisocial behavior. Kristin Laurin, Azim Shariff, Joseph Henrich, and Aaron Kay looked at the effects of temporary religious reminders as well as religious belief on the tendency to punish freeloaders at a personal cost. When people witness someone violate a cooperative norm, do reminders of God make them more willing to pay a cost to punish a freeloader? Or do these reminders have the opposite effect? Their results are noteworthy in several respects. First, they found that the effects of reminders of God were specific to believers only, once again suggesting that many nonbelievers are immune to religious priming. Second, they found, like Ryan McKay and his colleagues in another study, that believers in God were indeed more likely to punish, especially when they were reminded of their religious belief. So far, so good, but what about those believers who are convinced that God is punitive? Contrary to an ideomotor interpretation, those believers in a punitive God punished less. In essence, those participants saw an opportunity to offload punishing duties to God. They who thought God, not people, is responsible for punishing norm-violators, punished less. In short, it appears that belief in divine punishment diminished the motivation for earthly forms of costly punishment. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 170

Categorization

• XREF: Deepens the reader’s Big God vs. partner-choice framework: divine punishment as a moral hazard that crowds out human enforcement — connects to Rodrigues’ passive reliance on God’s justice in Silence.
• QUESTION: Does this ‘offloading’ effect mean Big Gods work better for internalized cooperation but worse for third-party enforcement in social environments?