Communicating group commitment is critical for identifying reliable cooperative partners, and this assortment has been theorized to be facilitated by attaching costs to commitment signals. However, it remains unresolved why outsiders would not strategically fake such signals and then free-ride on the group’s public goods. We propose that the reliability of commitment signals is facilitated by differential computation of a signal’s costs and benefits, such that the cost-benefit trade-off favors signal production only for genuinely committed individuals. To test this, we conducted three preregistered studies (total N = 1,341; US general population) in which participants could choose to signal cooperative intent and then play a public goods game with other signalers (or non-signalers). We assessed how perceived costs and benefits of signaling varied across cooperative versus selfish strategies and modeled how these perceptions predicted signaling choices. Study 1 showed that cooperative individuals perceived greater cooperative benefits of signaling and preferentially assorted with one another, although selfish individuals who faked signals earned the most by free-riding. Study 2 used a real-world signal—religious text transcription—and demonstrated that highly costly religious signals deter outsiders, rendering religious cooperation profitable and resistant to free-riders, though not via differential perceptions of cooperative benefits. Finally, Study 3 revealed that committed members perceived religious signals as providing additional (i.e., not only cooperative) benefits that outsiders did not perceive, inadvertently stabilizing the cooperative function of religious signals. Together, these findings suggest that costly signals of group commitment persist because, while both cooperators and free-riders perceive cooperative benefits, the signaling trade-off is favorable only for those who also perceive additional benefits of signal production. Further and cross-cultural work is needed to establish the generality of this mechanism.

Societal gender role norms play a crucial role in shaping men's and women's career aspirations. However, prior research documenting this key role of gendered norms has primarily focused on heterosexual women and men in the global North-West. Previous studies documenting differences in career interests by sexual orientation suggest that gender role norms might affect lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) women and men less strongly than heterosexuals. This large-scale, preregistered study sought to document group differences in norm perceptions, career interests and their relationship. To this end, 18,351 university students (n = 3318 LGB, n = 15,033 heterosexual) from 46 countries completed a self-report survey about their gender, sexual orientation, perceptions of societal gender role norms, as well as their personal gender role beliefs and career interests. Analyses revealed that, compared to heterosexual individuals, LGB individuals reported significantly less stereotypical career interests and endorsed less traditional gender role beliefs about careers. As predicted, perceptions of societal gender role norms predicted career interests for heterosexual but not for LGB participants. Moreover, LGB participants showed a weaker relationship between societal gender role norms and own gender role beliefs than straight participants did. Interestingly, we found no evidence that this effect was conditional on the level of LGBT acceptance in different countries sampled. We discuss implications of this new evidence for understanding occupational gender segregation from an intersectional perspective.

Many people around the world believe that to be moral, one must believe in God. However, individuals who do not believe in God also hold distinct ethical beliefs. Similar to theists, non-theists in different cultures may share overarching narratives about morality and what it is founded upon—a possibility that remains understudied. In the present research, we utilised open-ended survey data to explore what non-theists from ten countries (N = 996) described as the basis of their views on right and wrong. We also investigated how different beliefs about morality clustered together. The findings show diversity but also point towards cross-culturally recurring patterns in non-theistic beliefs and belief clusters concerning 1) important moral principles and 2) perceived sources of morality. We furthermore discuss country-specific findings, such as the importance of ‘conscience’ for Turkish and Czech participants and ‘cultural Christianity’ in the Danish sample. Altogether, the results support research indicating that a lack of belief in God does not entail moral relativism and question views on non-theists primarily seeing morality as self-constructed. Instead, our findings point towards a more prominent role of social interaction and ‘social contract’ in views about the basis of right and wrong. In light of the results, we suggest that predominant ways of measurement in moral psychology may currently obscure diversity in non-theistic moral outlooks, such as more communal secular ethics. The main limitation of the research is convenience sampling. We therefore encourage future work to utilise representative samples to explore differing secular moralities and their predictors.

Religious diversity has had profound consequences in human history, but the dynamics of how it evolves remain unclear. One unresolved question is the extent to which religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events. Anecdotal evidence tends to favour the second view, but quantitative evidence on a global scale is lacking. Phylogenetic methods that treat religious denominations as evolving lineages can help to resolve this question. Here we apply computational phylogenetic methods to a purpose-built data set documenting 291 religious denominations and their genealogical relationships to derive dated phylogenies of three families of world religions - Indo-Iranian, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian. We model the birth of new denominations along the branches of these phylogenies, test for shifts in the birth rate, and draw tentative links between the shifts we find and religious history. We find evidence for birth rate shifts in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian families, corresponding to at least three separate events that have shaped global religious diversity.

While costly signals of commitment were proposed to facilitate cooperative assortment in humans, little is known about cognitive processes facilitating the reliability of such commitment signals. Across three studies (total N = 2,223), we test whether this reliability is supported by intuitive processes or by deliberative cost-benefit evaluations. Participants played a public goods game in which they could send variously costly signals of commitment, and the signaling decision was made either under time pressure or delay. Under pressure, signals separated cooperators from selfish players only when signal cost was high. However, these intuitive, high-cost signals did not consistently predict subsequent cooperation. By contrast, when participants had time to deliberate under time delay, cooperators selectively chose the low-cost signal more often than selfish players and contributed more to the common pool. These findings suggest that reliable commitment signaling depends less on intuitive attraction to costly displays and more on deliberative cost-benefit evaluation where cooperators optimize signal cost.

Despite the growing demand for care economy employees (e.g., nurses, teachers, and social workers), men remain underrepresented in these careers. While economically developed countries support more equal rights for women and men, their labor markets are highly gender segregated (Charles, 1992, 2003). We conducted a focused investigation of this paradoxical pattern in the care economy, testing whether gender gaps in care economy career interest are larger in more economically developed countries and, if so, what psychological and cultural factors underlie these patterns. We examined these questions with labor data from 70 countries (Study 1) and a preregistered study of career interests among 19,240 university students from 49 countries (Study 2). Although more economically developed countries tend to promote greater gender equality, our results reveal that the gender gap in care economy representation (Study 1) and interest (Study 2) is especially large in such countries. We did not observe parallel patterns for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics representation or interest. Results from Study 2 supported an integrated theoretical account of this development paradox in care economy interest: Cross-national variation in the gender gap in care economy interest was predicted by country-level variation in economic development and individualism/collectivism but not by self-expression values or country-level gender equality, countering prior (controversial) claims of a gender equality paradox. Furthermore, larger gender gaps in communal values (e.g., men's lower valuing of helping and caring for others) were a proximal predictor of larger gender gaps in care economy interest in highly economically developed countries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In their target article, White et al. celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), looking back on what has been done as well as into the possible futures that await this academic discipline. We are joyous to join this celebration as we consider ourselves ardent members of this discipline and wish to see the discipline flourish. Indeed, most of us academically grew up on the works of the CSR founding figures—many of whom are the authors of the present target article—and when founding our lab, we were much inspired by their call for more empirical evidence that would test the proposed theoretical models. Yet, as the inevitable law of inter-generational disagreement dictates, we see the recent developments of CESR (where the additional 'E' stands for evolution) and its near future fairly differently than White et al. In this spirit, our commentary offers several critical reflections on the target article, its scope as well as the proposed future directions for CESR.

Humans often participate in physically harmful and demanding rituals with no apparent material benefits. Although such behaviours have traditionally been explained using the lens of costly signalling theory, we question whether the canonical theory can be applied to the case of human cooperative signals and introduce a modification of this theory based on differential benefit estimation. We propose that along with cooperative benefits, committed members also believe in supernaturally induced benefits, which motivate participation in extreme rituals and stabilize their effects on cooperative assortment. Using Thaipusam Kavadi as a prototypical costly ritual, Tamil (ingroup) and Christian (outgroup) participants in Mauritius (N = 369) assessed the cost and benefits of Kavadi participation or hiking. We found that ingroup participants estimated material costs as larger than outgroups, physical costs as lower, and benefits as larger. These findings suggest that estimated costs may vary by modality and cultural expectations (e.g. Kavadi participants are not supposed to display pain), while supernaturally induced benefits were consistently reported as larger by ingroups compared to outgroups. We conclude that differential estimation of ritual benefits, not costs, are key to the persistence of extreme rituals and their function in the assortment of committed members, underscoring the role of differential estimation in the cognitive computation of signal utility.

In the following, I consider how to better link the study of cognition and behavior to the evolutionary origins of cognitive mechanisms, within the framework of embodied cognition theory. Specifically, I attempt to show this by examining the topic of individual commitment, its origins, and its relationship to beliefs and identity. I then go on to point out that the way we talk about cognition and cognitive processes can be misleading, and although we cannot dispense with the use of metaphorical language, it might be worth considering some of the shortcomings of the metaphors in order to rid ourselves of misconceptions.

This commentary highlights the important contributions of the target book to the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and identifies several issues and challenges that should be addressed in future work. The crucial challenges pertain to the need for more thorough theoretical modeling of what religious beliefs add to the effects of ritual behavior, the need for longitudinal studies of mundane but frequently performed individual rituals, and the need for translating the results of basic research on rituals into applied outputs. We describe those challenges in detail and suggest potential remedies and future directions.

Extreme rituals and similar costly conventions are traditionally explained as commitment signals that assort dedicated individuals. However, it is unclear why outsiders would not fake such signals—participate in rituals—and free-ride on the cooperative effort of committed members. We propose that biases in signal value computation promote the cooperative functions. In three pre-registered studies (total N = 1,341, general US population), we first showed in an artificial setting that committed individuals assort by overestimating signal benefits, although free-riders faking the signal earned the most. Using a real-world identity—religious affiliation—the second study demonstrated that highly costly religious signals deter outsiders, making religious cooperation profitable and resistant to free-riders. Finally, the third study revealed that religious signals were perceived by committed members to bring additional benefits that were not perceived by outsiders. This differential benefit estimation explains why highly costly signals such as extreme rituals persist and promote cooperation.

Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpaid domestic work have been affected by the pandemic, with individuals seeing mothers' relative to fathers' share of housework and child care as even larger. Moderation analyses revealed that the effect of the pandemic on descriptive norms about child care decreased with countries' increasing levels of gender equality; countries with stronger gender inequality showed a larger difference between pre- and post-pandemic. This study documents a shift in descriptive norms and discusses implications for gender equality-emphasizing the importance of addressing the additional challenges that mothers face during health-related crises.

In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre-registered, cross-national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries indicated the degree to which they believe childcare is (descriptive norm) and should be (prescriptive norm) equally divided among mothers and fathers. Policies were primarily operationalized as the existence of parental leave options in the respective country. The descriptive and prescriptive norms of equal division of childcare were stronger when parental leave was available in a country - also when controlling for potential confounding variables. Moreover, analyses of time since policy change suggested that policy change may initially affect prescriptive norms and then descriptive norms at a later point. However, due to the cross-sectional nature of the data, drawing causal inferences is difficult.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Masaryk University [grant number MUNI/A/1396/2022].

This commentary highlights the important contributions of the target book to the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and identifies several issues and challenges that should be addressed in future work. The crucial challenges pertain to the need for more thorough theoretical modeling of what religious beliefs add to the effects of ritual behavior, the need for longitudinal studies of mundane but frequently performed individual rituals, and the need for translating the results of basic research on rituals into applied outputs. We describe those challenges in detail and suggest potential remedies and future directions.

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender-based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental-leave intentions in young adults (18-30years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identified as women; 5,062 identified as men) across 37 countries that varied in parental-leave policies and societal gender equality. In all countries, women intended to take longer leave than men. National parental-leave policies and women's political representation partially explained cross-national variations in the gender gap. Gender gaps in leave intentions were paradoxically larger in countries with more gender-egalitarian parental-leave policies (i.e., longer leave available to both fathers and mothers). Interestingly, this cross-national variation in the gender gap was driven by cross-national variations in women's (rather than men's) leave intentions. Financially generous leave and gender-egalitarian policies (linked to men's higher uptake in prior research) were not associated with leave intentions in men. Rather, men's leave intentions were related to their individual gender attitudes. Leave intentions were inversely related to career ambitions. The potential for existing policies to foster gender equality in paid and unpaid work is discussed.

Employing an incentivized controlled lab experiment, we investigate the effects of ovulatory shift on salient behavioral outcomes related to (i) risk preferences, (ii) rule violation, and (iii) exploratory attitude. As evolutionary psychology suggests, these outcomes may play an important role in economic decision-making and represent behavioral aspects that may systematically vary over the menstrual cycle to increase the reproductive success. Exploiting a within-subjects design, 124 naturally cycling females participated in experimental sessions during their ovulation and menstruation, the phases between which the difference in the investigated behavior should be the largest. In each session, hormonal samples for cortisol, estradiol, and testosterone were collected. The group of women was also contrasted against an auxiliary reference group composed of 47 males, who are not subject to hormonal variations of this nature. Our results reveal no systematic behavioral differences between the ovulation and menstruation phases.

The global increase in non-religious individuals begs for a better understanding of what non-religious beliefs and worldviews actually entail. Rather than assuming an absence of belief or imposing a predetermined set of beliefs, this research uses an open-ended approach to investigate which secular beliefs and worldviews non-religious non-theistic individuals in 10 countries around the world might endorse. Approximately one thousand participants were recruited (N = 996; approximately one hundred participants per country) and completed the online survey. A data-driven coding scheme of the open-ended question about the participants’ beliefs and worldviews was created and includes 51 categories in 11 supercategories (agency & control, collaboration & peace, equality & kindness, morality, natural laws & the here and now, non-religiosity, reflection & acceptance, science & critical thinking, spirituality, truth, and other). The 10 most frequently mentioned categories were science, humanism, critical scepticism, natural laws, equality, kindness & caring, care for the earth, left-wing political causes, atheism, and individualism & freedom. Patterns of beliefs were explored, demonstrating three worldview belief sets: scientific worldviews, humanist worldviews, and caring nature-focused worldviews. This project is a timely data-driven exploration of the content and range of global secular worldviews around the world, and matches previous theoretical work. Future research may utilise these data and findings to construct more comprehensive surveys to be completed in additional countries.

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.

Research testing evolutionary models of religious morality shows that supernatural beliefs in moralizing gods positively affect prosociality. However, the effects of beliefs related to local supernatural agents have not been extensively explored. Drawing from a Mauritian Hindu sample, we investigated the effects of beliefs and practices related to two different types of local supernatural agents (spirits of the deceased unconcerned with morality) on preferential resources allocation to receivers differing in geographical and social closeness to participants. These spirits are ambiguously linked to either ancestor worship or sorcery practice. Previous studies suggested that sorcery beliefs erode social bonds and trust, but such research is often limited by social stigma and missing relevant comparison with other beliefs. To overcome these limitations, we used nuanced free-list data to discriminate between the two modes of spirit beliefs and tested how each contributes to decision-making in economic games (Random Allocation, Dictator). Expressing sorcery beliefs together with performing rituals addressed to the spirits was associated with greater probability of rule-breaking for selfish/parochial outcomes in the Random Allocation Game (compared to ancestor worship). No difference in money allocations was found in the Dictator Game.