In their God we trust:religious cognition increases cooperation across religious divides

Belief in moralizing Gods is widely thought to foster cooperation between coreligionists, but there is disagreement regarding whether this effect is limited to the religious ingroup or if it extends to members of religious outgroups. Here we report the results of a cross-cultural research program that demonstrates that people who think about God (1) are more trusted by both coreligionists and members of other religious groups, and (2) typically behave in a more trustworthy manner towards both ingroups and outgroups. We ran three preregistered studies (N = 1,784) with Christians and Muslims in the U.S., Jews and Muslims in Israel, and Christians and Hindus in Fiji. Our contexts varied in multiple ways, including the level of intergroup conflict. Using two-player trust games involving real money, we varied whether participants interacted with ingroup or outgroup members and whether reciprocators considered God when deciding how much to return to trustors. We find in each context that making moralizing God beliefs of one player salient enhances both intragroup and intergroup cooperation. Our findings add to a nascent literature documenting the potential for religious cognition to extend moral norms across intergroup divides. We discuss implications for theories of the emergence of moralizing gods, and implications for public debates about religious pluralism in diverse societies.