“Can we walk?” Environmental supports for physical activity in India

India is currently facing a non-communicable disease epidemic. Physical activity (PA) is a preventative factor for non-communicable diseases. Understanding the role of the built environment (BE) to facilitate or constrain PA is essential for public health interventions to increase population PA. The objective of this study was to understand BEs associations with PA occurring in two major life domains or life areas—travel and leisure—in urban India. Between December 2014 and April 2015, in-person surveys were conducted with participants (N = 370; female = 47.2%) in Chennai, India. Perceived BE characteristics regarding residential density, land use mix-diversity, land use mix-access, street connectivity, infrastructure for walking and bicycling, aesthetics, traffic safety, and safety from crime were measured using the adapted Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale-India (NEWS-India). Self-reported PA was measured the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. High residential density was associated with greater odds of travel PA (aOR = 1.9, 95% CI = 1.2, 3.2). Land use mix-diversity was positively related to travel PA (aOR = 2.1, 95%CI = 1.2, 3.6), but not associated with leisure or total PA. The aggregate NEWS-India score predicted a two-fold increase in odds of travel PA (aOR = 1.9, 95% CI = 1.1, 3.1) and a 40% decrease in odds of leisure PA (aOR = 0.6, 95% CI = 0.4, 1.0). However, the association of the aggregated score with leisure PA was not significant. Results suggest that relationships between BE and PA in low-and-middle income countries may be context-specific, and may differ markedly from higher income countries. Findings have public health implications for India suggesting that caution should be taken when translating evidence across countries

Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures

Research transparency and reproducibility: Pre-registration materials, supplementary analyses and plots, as well as data and analysis scripts for this study are openly available at: https://github.com/tbendixen/moral-freelist-econ .Supplementary material: Supplemental materials are available at https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.15 .Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. 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.‘The Emergence of Prosocial Religions’ from the John Templeton Foundation, and the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium, funded by a generous partnership grant (895-2011-1009) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; CH and SM were funded by the John Templeton Foundation grant no. 48952; TB, ADL and BGP acknowledge funding from Aarhus University Research Foundation

Physical Attractiveness and Altruism in Two Modified Dictator Games

Several studies find that male individuals are more altruistic toward attractive women, suggesting altruism may serve as a courtship display. Many studies exploring this phenomenon have used vignettes and facial images. We tested the sexual selection hypothesis as an explanation for altruistic behavior, where players played the dictator game with “live” participants. Two studies were conducted (Study 1, n = 212; Study 2, n = 188) where we manipulated stakes and anonymity between participants to explore the relationship between the dictator’s allocations and their perceived attractiveness of the recipient. We found no relationship between attractiveness and altruism. Dictators were consistently fair when allocating stakes, irrespective of the recipients’ attractiveness

The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies

Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this “gender gap” may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 diverse societies. While variation exists across societies, women in general indicate greater mental commitment (i.e., thinking and worrying more about) to their community’s moralistic god, more frequent participation in rituals for their community’s moralistic god, and more frequent prayer. While we find that the gender gap extends beyond the Christian world, no such difference was seen in religious commitment towards more local gods, to which men tend to show greater commitment. Tentative support is provided for explanations relating gender differences in religiosity to lower formal education and greater mentalizing among women, however an explanation for greater religious commitment to local gods among men remains elusive. Nevertheless, our data suggest that the moralizing gods of some contemporary world religions, unlike local deities and traditions, have evolved in ways that make them more appealing to women

The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that local deities care about punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect is stable even after holding beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities constant. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally interested. There is no evidence to suggest that this effect is due to direct missionary contact. We posit that the “moralization bias of gods’ minds” is part of a widespread but variable religious phenotype, and a candidate mechanism that contributes to the well-recognized association between religion and cooperation

The moralization bias of gods’ minds: a cross-cultural test

There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute moral concern—a “moralization bias”—to supernatural deities follows. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, we test for the existence of such a bias. We find that people are indeed more likely than chance to indicate that local deities are concerned with punishing theft, murder, and deceit. This effect is stable even after holding constant the effects of beliefs about explicitly moralistic deities. Additionally, we take a close look at data collected among Hadza foragers and find two of their deities to be morally interested. There is no evidence to suggest that this effect is due to direct missionary contact. We posit that the “moralization bias of gods’ minds” is part of a widespread but variable religious phenotype, and a candidate mechanism that contributes to the well-recognized association between religion and cooperation.The Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) was supported by a SSHRC partnership grant (#895-2011-1009) and the John Templeton Foundation (grant ID 40603). BGP and CTR acknowledge support from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and BGP acknowledges support from the Consequences of Formal Education for Science and Religion Project grant that was funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Issachar Fund