Do you believe the world will come to an end within your lifetime, and does that belief change the way you see existential threats to humanity? One-third of Americans answer yes to the first question; we venture to answer the second question here. Stories about the end of the world are historically and globally prevalent and come in many flavours. End of world beliefs have been hypothesized to shape processes of risk perception and social behaviour that have implications for how societies respond to existential threats. Despite their cultural significance, current understanding of the psychology of these beliefs is lacking. In this article, we present the results of six pilot studies (N = 2,079) and one pre-registered study (N = 1,409) that establish a psychological framework for end of world beliefs. A measure of end of world beliefs was created and validated across six religious populations (Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and nonreligious). We find that end of world beliefs are common, vary along psychologically meaningful dimensions, and are uniquely predictive of people’s risk perception, risk tolerance, and willingness to support extreme action to address the five most pressing global existential risks (i.e., economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological). Results are interpreted in light of current models of risk perception and the cultural evolution of worldviews. Aligning with sociological and historical analyses, we argue that belief in apocalyptic narratives—irrespective of their accuracy—is consequential for how populations confront concrete risks, including those that threaten humanity today.

Humans show marked diversity in cultural values, beliefs, and preferences. Here, we analyze survey responses from 640,110 individuals in 117 countries (representing 89% of the World's population), and 2,333 sub-national districts, surveyed in the World Values Survey and the European Values Study. Across multiple sets of comparable cultural traits, we find that religion consistently emerges as the cultural trait that exhibits the largest cross-country divergence (measured by the Cultural Fixation Index or simple variances). For example, personal emphasis on religion varies 5-10 times more across countries than emphasis on family, politics, or work effort, and religion is the most divergent quality valued for raising children. Likewise, differences in religious group membership across countries exceed those in other voluntary affiliations. These cross-country differences in religiosity stem partly from differences between religious traditions, but mostly from individual differences in religious involvement intensity. Our findings underscore the importance of religion in shaping cultural differences across societies.

Previous research has shown that people who report a greater spiritual connection with nature (“ecospirituality”) express a more highly moralized concern for its preservation. Other results also suggest a possible link between ecospirituality and subjective well-being. In order to test the causal nature of these relations, we created a novel intervention designed to temporarily boost ecospirituality and, in a high-powered preregistered study (N=779), tested the effects of this intervention (compared to two control conditions) on measures assessing concern for the environment and well-being. Results on the effects of the ecospirituality intervention were inconclusive: Participants in all three conditions showed similar pre-intervention/post-intervention changes on the dependent measures, and also showed similar pre/post changes in self-reported ecospirituality (which served as a manipulation check). Exploratory correlational results showed that, across conditions, pre/post increases in self-reported ecospirituality predicted increases in both environmental concern and well-being. The correlational results replicate and extend prior findings—suggesting that ecospirituality may offer benefits to nature and to oneself—but additional research is required to establish causal evidence for this contention.

Many people in many cultures have a spiritual connection with nature. Research is beginning to reveal the implications of this “ecospiritual” orientation for two great challenges of our times: preserving the well-being of the natural environment and of ourselves. This article provides an overview of the current research on ecospirituality, with a focus on its role in supporting, and sometimes inadvertently hindering, environmental preservation and human well-being.

The Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) have grown rapidly in developed, secularizing societies. We hypothesize that one reason for the proliferation of the SBNR is that spiritual beliefs, distinct from religiosity, afford some degree of meaning in life to people leaving religion. In two pre-registered studies (USn = 917; UKn = 1,289), we compared meaning in life among religious believers, SBNRs, and non-believers. Religious believers reported the most meaning, followed by SBNRs, and then non-believers, who reported the least meaning. Further analyses revealed that the differences between SBNRs and non-believers are largely mediated by differences in their degree of spiritual beliefs, whereas the differences between SBNRs and religious believers are largely mediated by differences in their degree of social connection. We conclude that spiritual beliefs and social connection play distinct roles in the creation of existential meaning in life, which may partly explain the popularity of SBNRs in secularizing societies.

Environmental issues are becoming increasingly politically polarized, making common ground essential. This research investigated the political common ground of environmental motives—the reasons why nature is worth preserving. Natural language processing of liberals’ and conservatives’ open text responses (Study 1: N=1,544) identified 12 central motives. Political common ground was shared on the most cited motives: Human survival, moral obligations to future generations, and appreciation for nature’s beauty. Political differences emerged on motives related to climate change risks and religious stewardship. Study 2 (N=796) replicated these findings using a validated self-report questionnaire based on participant responses in Study 1. Factor analysis indicated motives belonged to four categories: Responsibility to nature, instrumental benefits, childhood experiences, and religious stewardship. These motives explained substantial variance in environmental attitudes and partially accounted for political differences in attitudes. The studies used mixed methods and direct/conceptual replication to build confidence in key findings and longstanding theoretical frameworks.

As a cultural species, humans show marked global diversity in preferences, beliefs, and behaviors (cultural traits). Of the many types of cultural traits, which ones generate the most global diversity across countries? We address this question by analyzing data for 640,110 individuals from 117 countries, 2,333 sub-national districts worldwide, and 13 birth cohorts surveyed in the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS). We measure cultural diversity using the standard Cultural Fixation Index (CFst). Across multiple sets of comparable cultural traits, we find that religious cultural traits are globally most diverse. In personal values, the emphasis on religion differs 5-10 times more than the emphasis on family, politics, or work effort across countries. Similarly, in qualities important for raising children, religion showed the most cultural divergence. Diversity in religious membership is also significantly higher, compared to memberships in political, environmental or sports organizations. This global divergence had two distinct sources: it was partly the result of differences among particular religious groups, namely Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus; but in large part it was due to individual differences in the strength of religious engagement, irrespective of religious tradition. The results reveal the pervasive role of religion and secularization in the cultural evolution of societies.

The multi-site replication study, Many Labs 2, concluded that sample location and setting did not substantially affect the replicability of findings. Here, we examine theoretical and methodological considerations for a subset of the analyses, namely exploratory tests of heterogeneity in the replicability of studies between "WEIRD and less-WEIRD cultures". We conducted a review of literature citing the study, a re-examination of the existing cultural variability, a power stimulation for detecting cultural heterogeneity, and re-analyses of the original exploratory tests. Findings indicate little cultural variability and low power to detect cultural heterogeneity effects in the Many Labs 2 data, yet the literature review indicates the study is cited regarding the moderating role of culture. Our reanalysis of the data found that using different operationalizations of culture slightly increased effect sizes but did not substantially alter the conclusions of Many Labs 2. Future studies of cultural heterogeneity can be improved with theoretical consideration of which effects and which cultures are likely to show variation as well as a priori methodological planning for appropriate operationalizations of culture and sufficient power to detect effects.

How can psychology transform itself into an inclusive science that engages with the rich cultural diversity of humanity? How can we strive towards a broader and deeper understanding of human behavior that is both generalizable across populations and attentive to its diversity? To address these major questions of our field, relying on scholars from different world regions, we outline first the opportunities associated with conducting psychological research in these and other majority world regions, highlighting international collaborations. Cross-cutting research themes in psychological research in the majority world are presented along with the urgent need to adopt a more critical lens to research and knowledge production within psychology. Indigenization, critical, transformative and liberatory approaches to understanding psychological phenomena framed within the decolonial imperative are presented as future options for a more diverse and equitable psychological science. Next, we address challenges, including limited institutional research infrastructure, limited national investment in research, political and social challenges these regions face, and the impact of imported (rather than locally produced) psychological knowledge. We conclude by offering recommendations to enable psychological science to be more representative of the world's population. Our aim is to facilitate a broader, better-informed, and more empathic conversation among psychological scientists worldwide about ways to make psychological science more representative, culturally informed and inclusive.

Religious sermons are a powerful cultural vehicle that reach about one third ofAmericans every week at church. Sermons convey a religion’s teachings, worldviews,and moral codes, yet little is known about the contents of American sermons and howthey vary across churches, denominations, and geographic space. We analyzed 20,624sermons delivered between 2019-2020 across 3,143 American counties and 6 Christiandenominations using a tripartite approach. First, topic modeling provided a descriptiveprofile of the textual, topical, and liturgical components of sermons, highlighting thedominant role of moral instruction, including advice on living a rich life. Second, variancedecomposition indicated that sermon content varied widely across individual churchesand denominations, but less so across geographical space. As such, denominationswere most distinctive in their liturgical components (e.g., Catholic Mass versuscharismatic preaching), but were highly similar in their prioritization of specific morals,values, and emotions. Third, cross-validated elastic net models demonstrated thatsermon content predicted substantial out-of-sample variance in regional political, social,health, and economic outcomes, such as voting behavior, firearm fatalities, and lifeexpectancy. These associations were robust to a series of robustness checks,suggesting that sermons contain unique information about local socio-political context.This is the most comprehensive study of sermons to date and provides a portrait of themany faces of the American church.

How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the content of freely-listed data about gods’ concerns collected from individuals across eight diverse field sites and contextualize these beliefs in their respective cultural milieus. In our analysis, we find that local deities’ concerns point to costly threats to local coordination and cooperation. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative approaches to religious beliefs and appeals fare in light of our results and close by considering some key implications for the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion.

People across time and cultures have often conceived of nature, and humanity's connection to it, as essentially spiritual. Yet the psychological literature about this "ecospiritual" orientation has been meager. In eight samples, recruited from the USA, Canada, UK, and Singapore (Total N = 8795), we investigated the relationship between ecospirituality and moral concern for nature. We developed and validated an 8-item measure of ecospirituality for this purpose. Ecospirituality, over and above environmental attitudes, environmentalist identity, and political orientation, uniquely predicted several aspects of moral concern for nature, such as including nature in one's moral circle, treating nature as a sacred value, and endorsing a reasoning style that places importance on principles and duties to nature. This reasoning style was reflected in decisions involving nature-economic trade-offs, as well as in an unconditional voting style for the Green Party. We discuss how a spiritual view of nature is an important component of the moral psychology of the human-nature relationship, and what implications it might have for interventions aimed at increasing sustainability.

Supernatural beliefs shape how people understand the world, but there is debate regarding how these beliefs relate to the natural or social world. Jackson and colleagues quantitatively analysed the ethnographic record and found evidence that supernatural explanations are more commonly used for natural than for social phenomena.

The multi-site replication study, Many Labs 2 (ML2), attempted to test whether population, site and setting variability moderates the likelihood of replication and effect size. The analysis concluded that sample location and setting did not substantially affect the replicability of findings. In this paper, we raise several issues with the ML2 approach to adjudicating the effect of culture that cast doubt on this conclusion. These theoretical and methodological problems (pre-registered at https://osf.io/6exr4) involve the: (1) selection of studies and sample sites for replication that are not theory-driven, (2) sampling of mostly WEIRD people around the world, (3) conflation of participants’ cultural backgrounds with the country where the samples came from, (4) use of the WEIRD backronym by decomposing it into a scale, and (5) application of a mean split of that WEIRD variable. Moreover, simulations reveal strikingly low statistical power for detecting cultural influences in a multi-side study designed like ML2. We propose methodologies to address problems (3) to( 5) by re-analyzing the ML2 dataset using an alternative approach. These results suggest that tackling only some of the design problems is insufficient to overcome the underlying theoretical and methodological deficiencies. We conclude with specific recommendations for assessing the role of population variability in future multi-site studies that address evidentiary value and effect size.

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10,535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.

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.