Believing God is punishing deters cheating more than believing God is kind

Evidence

In a pair of studies, Azim Shariff and I set out to find the answer. We first measured the degree to which University of British Columbia students believe God is kind, compassionate, and forgiving or mean, wrathful, and punishing. It turns out that these two perceptions are moderately inversely related, meaning that the more one believes God is mean, the less one also believes God is kind. (This contradicts theological teachings that may prescribe both kinds of attributes to God simultaneously, but we have seen again and again that people are not theologians.) Days after participants rated God on these characteristics, we invited them to take part in an apparently unrelated study, in which the same participants took a rigged math test on a computer, where they had opportunities to cheat while alone in a room. In reality, the computer covertly recorded the amount of cheating. While religious belief itself was unrelated to cheating—believers and nonbelievers were equally likely to cheat or not cheat—among believers, mean-God supporters were much less likely to cheat than nice-God supporters. In short, we found in the lab what cultural evolution stumbled on and exploited for thousands of years: mean gods make good people. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 168

Categorization

• QUESTION: Would this mean-God effect replicate across cultures with different dominant theologies, or is it specific to a Western Christian sample at one Canadian university?
• XREF: Directly relevant to the analytical project: Norenzayan’s mean-god finding is the mechanism behind Rodrigues’s shame under divine gaze in Silence, and complicates Baumard’s partner-choice account which emphasizes God’s benevolence. — connects to: Subliminal God words curb cheating regardless of personal religiosity.; Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 159; Supernatural punishment explains religion’s prosocial effects better than ideomotor priming (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Could feed the Sacrifice article: the terror of a punishing deity is a deterrent, connecting to how sacrificial systems in stratified societies deploy fear of divine retribution to stabilize order.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compact co-existence of three claims — religiosity itself is unrelated to cheating, the God-attribute belief does predict cheating, and theology contradicts folk belief — captures a genuinely rich inversion of both the secularist and the religious presumption about religion and morality.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 168

Broader Connections

• Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods #corroborates (0.95) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 159
• Ideomotor accounts predict kind Gods matter while watcher accounts predict punishing ones #expands (0.85)
• Supernatural punishment explains religion’s prosocial effects better than ideomotor priming #expands (0.80)