Quentin Atkinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 360035 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Quentin Atkinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Quentin |
| FAMILY NAME | Atkinson |
| SIGNATURE | ATKINSON Q |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Auckland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8499-7535 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 155 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music
A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the Expa…
Prosocial Phenotype Predicts Political Views on Hierarchy and Redistribution 18 Months Later
Cross-sectional research has identified robust correlations between prosocial behavior in economic games and political views, but this research is limited in its ability to draw causal inferences. Here, we conducted a longitudinal cross-lagged panel study of prosociality and political views with a New Zealand sample ( n = 631). Across two waves separated by 18 months, we measured self-reported political views and employed a battery of economic ga…
Validation of the Mini‐Ipip6 Short‐Form Personality Inventory: Honesty‐Humility Predicts Cooperation in Economic Games
This study validated the Mini‐IPIP6 short‐form measure of Honesty‐Humility to predict cooperative behaviour in online economic games. A subsample of participants from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study completed four online economic games for money, in addition to the Mini‐IPIP6 six‐factor personality inventory ( N = 979). Cooperative behaviour was modelled as a latent variable reflecting behaviour across the four games. Honesty‐Humility …
Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity
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 denomination…
The Dual Foundations of Political Ideology Are Ubiquitous across Human Social Life
Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies
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 conten…
A Brief History of Political Instability in Vanuatu
Vanuatu has largely avoided the political violence seen elsewhere in Melanesia in the recent past. It has a small but successful tourist economy, based on its selling point as a tropical paradise. It has powerful cultural resources, in the form of Christianity and kastom, to bind its people together with a sense of belonging from a shared past and hope for a shared future. Vanuatu also has a well-earnt reputation for political fragmentation and i…
A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being
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 specific about generalisability
Dual Evolutionary Foundations of Political Ideology Predict Divergent Responses to Covid-19
Political conservatives' opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is puzzling given the well-documented links between conservatism and conformity, threat sensitivity, and pathogen aversion. We propose a resolution based on the Dual Foundations Theory of ideology, which holds that ideology comprises two dimensions, one reflecting trade-offs between threat-driven conformity and individualism, and another reflecting trade-offs between empathy-driven coop…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
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 t…
Challenging the Idea That Humans Are Not Designed to Solve Climate Change
In the face of a slow and inadequate global response to anthropogenic climate change, scholars and journalists frequently claim that human psychology is not designed or evolved to solve the problem, and they highlight a range of “psychological barriers” to climate action. Here, we critically examine this claim and the evidence on which it is based. We identify four key problems with attributing climate inaction to “human nature” or evolved psycho…
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
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…
Moralistic and local god beliefs and the extent of prosocial preferences on Tanna Island, Vanuatu
The co-existence of Christian and indigenous “Kastom” belief systems on Tanna Island, Vanuatu provides a rare opportunity to explore the relationship between cooperation and religion. Here, we use data on religious beliefs and practices, religious priming, and four versions of a dictator game at two sites—one predominantly Christian and one predominantly Kastom—to test a suite of hypotheses linking prosocial behavior to beliefs about and commitme…
Predictors of voter support for the legalization of recreational cannabis use and supply via a national referendum
Support for cannabis legalization was not based on broad demographics, but rather specific views concerning the medicinal benefit, morality of cannabis use, health risk of frequent cannabis use, political party affiliation, and knowledge of the proposed regulatory controls of the CLCB. The influence of moral views of cannabis use on voting behaviour suggest the need to debate the right to use cannabis. The importance of knowledge of the proposed …
Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy
Understanding global variation in democratic outcomes is critical to efforts to promote and sustain democracy today. Here, we use data on the democratic status of 221 modern and historical nations stretching back up to 200 years to show that, particularly over the last 50 years, nations with shared linguistic and, more recently, religious ancestry have more similar democratic outcomes. We also find evidence that for most of the last 50 years the …
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 d…
Coevolution of religious and political authority in Austronesian societies
Authority, an institutionalized form of social power, is one of the defining features of the large-scale societies that evolved during the Holocene. Religious and political authority have deep histories in human societies and are clearly interdependent, but the nature of their relationship and its evolution over time is contested. We purpose-built an ethnographic dataset of 97 Austronesian societies and used phylogenetic methods to address two lo…
Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures
Coding culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases
The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology
The cultural foundations of modern democracies
Computational phylogenetics and the internal structure of Pama-Nyungan
We present the first proposal of detailed internal subgrouping and higher-order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than twenty-five primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in the tree was impossible, either because extensive internal borrowing has obscured more remote relati…
The cultural morphospace of ritual form
The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology
Dual Evolutionary Foundations of Political Ideology Predict Divergent Responses to Covid-19
Political conservatives' opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is puzzling given the well-documented links between conservatism and conformity, threat sensitivity, and pathogen aversion. We propose a resolution based on the Dual Foundations Theory of ideology, which holds that ideology comprises two dimensions, one reflecting trade-offs between threat-driven conformity and individualism, and another reflecting trade-offs between empathy-driven coop…
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 d…
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures
Coding culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases
The cultural foundations of modern democracies
Christianity spread faster in small, politically structured societies
Understanding Change in Recycling and Littering Behavior Across a School Social Network
Understanding how communities change requires examining how individuals’ beliefs and behaviors are shaped by those around them. This paper investigates behavior change across a large social network following a recycling intervention in a New Zealand high school community. We used a mixed methods design, combining focus group data with social network analysis from two waves of a questionnaire that measured friendship networks; recycling and litter…
Group Size and the Trajectory of Religious Identification
The relative size of religious groups or denominations within societies or nations influences variation in the extent to which group members psychologically identify with their religion. National-level census data measuring the proportional size of religious groups in New Zealand are merged with nationally representative data on self-reported psychological identification drawn from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. A multilevel random c…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
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 t…
Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy
Understanding global variation in democratic outcomes is critical to efforts to promote and sustain democracy today. Here, we use data on the democratic status of 221 modern and historical nations stretching back up to 200 years to show that, particularly over the last 50 years, nations with shared linguistic and, more recently, religious ancestry have more similar democratic outcomes. We also find evidence that for most of the last 50 years the …
Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution
The cultural morphospace of ritual form
Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation
Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates
Supernatural punishment and individual social compliance across cultures
Cooperation for the public good is vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders because it always pays individuals to exploit the social contract for their own benefit. This problem can be resolved if free-riders are punished, but punishment is itself a public good subject to free-riding. The fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis (FSPH) proposes that belief in supernatural punishment might offer a solution to this problem by deflecting the cost…
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
A Family of Languages English is part of the large Indo-European language family, which includes Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. The origin of this family is hotly debated: one hypothesis places the origin north of the Caspian Sea in the Pontic steppes, from where it was disseminated by Kurgan semi-nomadic pastoralists; a second suggests that Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, is the source, and the language radia…
Computational phylogenetics and the internal structure of Pama-Nyungan
We present the first proposal of detailed internal subgrouping and higher-order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than twenty-five primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in the tree was impossible, either because extensive internal borrowing has obscured more remote relati…
Group Size and the Trajectory of Religious Identification
The relative size of religious groups or denominations within societies or nations influences variation in the extent to which group members psychologically identify with their religion. National-level census data measuring the proportional size of religious groups in New Zealand are merged with nationally representative data on self-reported psychological identification drawn from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. A multilevel random c…
Modes of Religiosity and the Evolution of Social Complexity at Çatalhöyük
One of the greatest unsolved puzzles in the study of cultural evolution is the first emergence of large-scale, complex civilizations. Social scientists and historians have long puzzled over the dynamics of large hierarchical societies and the mechanisms responsible for their survival and spread. But less is known about the origins of complex societies, which first emerged in only a few places around the world, leaving behind no written records of…
Understanding Change in Recycling and Littering Behavior Across a School Social Network
Understanding how communities change requires examining how individuals’ beliefs and behaviors are shaped by those around them. This paper investigates behavior change across a large social network following a recycling intervention in a New Zealand high school community. We used a mixed methods design, combining focus group data with social network analysis from two waves of a questionnaire that measured friendship networks; recycling and litter…
Are Big Gods a big deal in the emergence of big groups
In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between bi…
Folktale transmission in the Arctic provides evidence for high bandwidth social learning among hunter–gatherer groups
Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies
Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality
Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists. How has cooperation persisted in human societies that are increasingly large and complex, where simple relatedness is not necessarily sufficient? These authors examin…
The promise and limits of eco-evolutionary studies of human culture
Wilson et al. review past efforts to infuse evolutionary thinking into cultural studies and suggest that an ecosystems approach may be a fruitful way to move forward. We strongly endorse the notion
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
Post-marital residence patterns show lineage-specific evolution
Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post-marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patterns exhibit global regularities. Here, we study ethnographic observations of post-marital residence…
The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both cer…
Religion and expanding the cooperative sphere in Kastom and Christian villages on Tanna, Vanuatu
The coexistence of Christian and traditional “Kastom” beliefs on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu provides an especially interesting environment in which to investigate the association between religion and cooperation. Here I use an experimental economic game together with ethnographic and survey data to compare religious beliefs and practices and their association with cooperative behavior across two communities – one predominantly Christian and o…
Christianity spread faster in small, politically structured societies
The cultural foundations of modern democracies
Coding culture: Challenges and Recommendations for Comparative Cultural Databases
The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology
Challenging the Idea That Humans Are Not Designed to Solve Climate Change
In the face of a slow and inadequate global response to anthropogenic climate change, scholars and journalists frequently claim that human psychology is not designed or evolved to solve the problem, and they highlight a range of “psychological barriers” to climate action. Here, we critically examine this claim and the evidence on which it is based. We identify four key problems with attributing climate inaction to “human nature” or evolved psycho…
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
Sociology (28 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (22 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Political science (16 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Language and cultural evolution (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works)