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