Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods’ moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behaviour. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods.

We prove that the category of trees Ω is a test category in the sense of Grothendieck. This implies that the category of dendroidal sets is endowed with the structure of a model category Quillen-equivalent to spaces. We show that this model category structure, up to a change of cofibrations, can be obtained as an explicit left Bousfield localisation of the operadic model category structure.

We introduce a notion of n-quasi-categories as fibrant objects of a model category structure on presheaves on Joyal's n-cell category Θn. Our definition comes from an idea of Cisinski and Joyal. However, we show that this idea has to be slightly modified to get a reasonable notion. We construct two Quillen equivalences between the model category of n-quasi-categories and the model category of Rezk Θn-spaces, showing that n-quasi-categories are a model for (∞, n)-categories. For n = 1, we recover the two Quillen equivalences defined by Joyal and Tierney between quasi-categories and complete Segal spaces.