Believing God punishes reduces humans’ own costly punishment of norm violators

Evidence

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: Compound finding for the integration: fear of God deters the believer’s own cheating (par 169) yet paradoxically suppresses third-party costly punishment — relevant to whether Japanese apostasy-testing authorities are themselves deterred by their own moral systems.
• QUESTION: Does divine offloading of punishment imply that Big-God societies still need secular enforcement for third-party punishment, a gap Norenzayan may address in later chapters?