Researchers used various hypotheses to determine if cross-country differences in trust and cooperation would predict prosocial COVID-19 responses and policies. Using individual surveys from 34,526 participants from 41 countries, there were no significant associations between trust and cooperation and prosocial behavior, motivation, regulation, or stringency of policies. While the researchers did find significant variation among cross-country individuals, these results were unable to predict country-level prosocial responses.

How do educational attainment and food insecurity shape individual religiosity? The material insecurity hypothesis of religion claims that in conditions of material insecurity, individual religiosity will increase. However, through a cross-cultural analysis of 14 societies, the authors of this article find that formal education and food insecurity do not have a significant effect on religiosity.

This article aims to demonstrate the effects of national culture on countries’ COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates when controlling for GDP and population age over 65. The author measured various cultural dimensions derived from GLOBE and tested it against the country’s COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates. The author found a significant relationship between culture and COVID-19 outcomes suggesting that culture, beyond only GDP and age, may predict COVID-19 outcomes.

This article examines the relationship between the tightness-looseness of a culture and the variation of COVID-19 cases and deaths through October 2020. With COVID-19 data retrieved from Our World in Data from 57 countries with tightness-looseness figures, the article found the cultures with high levels of tightness had fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths when compared to countries with high levels of looseness. Results suggest support of the evolutionary game theoretic model proposing that people in tight cultures may cooperate with more urgency when under collective threat than people in loose cultures.

This paper adds to a body of research which analyzes the persistence of institutional features in societies over time by testing for association between local democracy (succession by consensus among preindustrial groups) and various measures of democracy in contemporary societies. The researchers conclude that beliefs and values which perceive democracy as a viable political structure may be an important mediating mechanism in producing and maintaining democratic instututions over time.

This study analyzes Weber's religious ethic thesis by investigating the relationship of religiosity on economic, social, and expressive individualism. The author found that religiosity increased economic individualism, and decreased social and expressive individualism. Under the notion that natural disasters prompt collectivistic defensive mechanisms, the author demonstrated some support that low levels of pathogen prevalence strengthened religiosity's relationships with social and expressive individualism, but not for economic individualism. The author did not find support for Weber's idea that Protestation will increase economic individualism and other religions, such as Islam, decrease economic individualism.

Using frequentist and Bayesian multi-level models in a sample of two international samples, the authors test whether there are significant sex differences in moral judgments across a large-scale examination of countries. They compare men and women using the five components of the Moral Foundations Theory: 1) care, (2) fairness, (3) loyalty, (4) authority, and (5) purity. In addition, they study the differences when considering socioeconomic and gender-equality status. The results partially support the presence of significant sex differences. While care, fairness, and purity were consistently higher for women; loyalty and authority were highly variable. The study also shows that there are larger sex differences in moral judgments across more individualist, WEIRD, and gender-equal societies.

In this paper, the author argues that moral systems evolved as a way to enforce cooperation between people outside of kin groups. Because cooperation within kin groups has apparent adaptive advantages, it is argued that these moral systems will be less important for societies with tight kin groups and conversely more important for those with looser kin groups. In order to test this theory, the author creates an original model that incorporates both ethnographic data and data from contemporary countries. Thus, it is postulated that historical kinship practices will influence contemporary systems. The paper concludes that there is sufficient historical evidence for this theory.

In this study, the authors inspect the relationship between religion, morality, and cooperation by examining the extent to which people associate their deities with moral concern. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, they find that on average, people tend to ascribe at least some moral concern to their deities, and this effect is stable even after controlling for the influence of explicitly moralistic deities that these societies also worship. The authors also find that ratings of moral concern are not necessarily very high, even for deities that are typically considered to be moralistic, and that there is individual-level variation in the degree of moral concern attributed to deities. In addition, there is an individual-level correlation between how morally interested two selected deities are conceived to be and that being male or more educated decreases the likelihood of associating deities with moral concern. These findings challenge the longstanding belief that belief in moralistic deities is unique to certain societies or religions and instead suggest that the association between deities and moral concern is more widespread and variable, and suggest that the moral character of gods may be tied to cooperation within societies.

In this article, the authors seek to test the theory that the veiling of women is a form of male mate guarding strategy, especially in harsh environments (specifically those with poor health and high mortality). They test this hypothesis using survey data drawn from 25 majority Muslim countries. This theory found support in the results of their statistical tests. In addition to testing the hypotheses articulated in the paper (as noted above), they also ran correlations between income level, importance of religion, and a countries sex ratio and views on the importance of veiling.