Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: Fear of vengeful omniscient gods may have helped human societies expand 
  
 Updated 
  
 Belief in an all-seeing punitive god motivates people to be more charitable towards strangers outside their own family and community, particularly to those of similar beliefs, researchers have found. 
  
 Key points Eight communities that adhere to a wide array of mainstream religions as well as animism and ancestor worship studied 
  
 People who believe in punitive, all knowing gods more likely to support people with same belief 
  
 Study suggests religion may have helped boost cooperation in societies 
  
 A study, published today in Nature, suggests religiosity may contribute to greater cooperation and collaboration despite geographic separation. 
  
 "People may trust in, cooperate with and interact fairly within wider social circles, partly because they believe that knowing gods will punish them if they do not," the study's authors wrote. 
  
 "Moreover, the social radius within which people are willing to engage in behaviours that benefit others at a cost to themselves may enlarge as gods' powers to monitor and punish increase." 
  
 To explore these ideas, researchers studied 591 people from eight diverse communities in Brazil, Mauritius, Siberia, Tanzania, Fiji and Vanuatu. 
  
 People in these communities adhere to a wide array of religions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism as well as local traditions such as animism and ancestor worship. 
  
 The participants played a game in which they were given the option to exercise financial favouritism towards themselves and their local community, or to be completely impartial by obeying the roll of a die, which could mean giving money to a distant person of the same religion. 
  
 Each participant's religious beliefs were also explored through interviews designed to assess how much their god or gods cared about morality, punishment, and how much those knowledge the gods had of individual's behaviour. 
  
 The researchers found people who believed in a more punitive, all-knowing god ended up giving more money to distant people who shared the same religious belief. 
  
 Playing fair or favourites 
  
 Lead author Dr Benjamin Purzycki said the results suggested people of the belief that one's actions are monitored, judged and punished by a deity were more likely to play fair than to play favourites. 
  
 "Ultimately we've all got very similar constitutions; we behave a certain way when we feel like we're being watched and if there's a threat of a punisher around, that alters our behaviour," said Dr Purzycki, post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture at the University of British Columbia. 
  
 We've all got very similar constitutions; we behave a certain way when we feel like we're being watched and if there's a threat of a punisher around, that alters our behaviour. Dr Benjamin Purzycki 
  
 "So what these gods seem to do is they harness that suite of psychological predispositions we have and it can steer our sociality and pro-sociality in specific ways." 
  
 Dr Purzycki said the stronger motivation provided by the threat of punishment rather than reward reflected human nature; when driven by reward, people are more likely to do dishonest things than when driven by the threat of punishment. 
  
 This can even overcome our evolutionary drive to look after our own - although the study did show that the more children people had, the more likely they were to play favourites. 
  
 "We found exactly what you would expect from a rational being where the more children people had the more likely they were to favour themselves and their local community at the expense of these geographically distant communities who shared the same religion beliefs and practices," Dr Purzycki said. 
  
 Belief expands cooperation with like-minded people 
  
 Given we live in an unprecedented global culture, the authors suggested religiosity may have helped to expand cooperation, trust and fairness towards far-flung strangers of similar religious persuasions. 
  
 "In addition to some forms of religious rituals and non-religious norms and institutions, such as courts, markets and police, the present results point to the role that commitment to knowledgeable, moralistic and punitive gods plays in solidifying the social bonds that create broader imagined communities," they wrote. 
  
 In an accompanying commentary, Professor Dominic D P Johnson from the University of Oxford pointed out the study did not explore whether the influence of an all-seeing powerful punisher on fairness would extend to individuals from different or no religious persuasion. 
  
 However, he said, the results offered "the most explicit evidence yet that belief in supernatural punishment has been instrumental in boosting cooperation in human societies". 
  
 Topics: science-and-technology, religion-and-beliefs, anthropology-and-sociology, vanuatu, fiji, brazil, mauritius, russian-federation, tanzania-united-republic-of 
  
 First posted ||||| Beliefs about all-knowing, punishing gods -- a defining feature of religions ranging from Christianity to Hinduism -- may have played a key role in expanding co-operation among far-flung peoples and led to the development of modern-day states, according to a UBC-led study published in Nature. 
  
 The research, an international collaboration among anthropologists and psychologists, looked at how religion affects humans' willingness to co-operate with those outside their social circle. The study involved interviews and behavioural experiments with nearly 600 people from communities in Vanuatu, Fiji, Brazil, Mauritius, Siberia and Tanzania whose religious beliefs included Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, animism and ancestor worship. 
  
 "Certain kinds of beliefs -- involving gods who are aware of human interactions and punish for moral transgressions -- can indeed contribute to the evolution of human co-operation," said lead author Benjamin Purzycki, a postdoctoral research fellow at UBC's Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. 
  
 "If you think you're being watched, and expect to be divinely punished for being too greedy or thieving, you might be less inclined to engage in anti-social behavior towards a wider range of people who share those beliefs." 
  
 Results show that believers in all-knowing gods who punish for wrongdoing are more likely to behave fairly towards anonymous, distant "co-religionists" -- those who share beliefs about gods and rituals, but may not belong to the same religious organization. 
  
 When people act this way, the study suggests, they are engaging in behaviour that can support key features of modern-day societies - such as large, co-operative institutions, trade, markets and partnerships. 
  
 "Religious beliefs may have been one of the major contributing factors in the development and stability of highly complex social organizations, such as states," said Purzycki. 
  
 Background 
  
 The paper, "Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality," is published in Nature. 
  
 The study included interviews along with two games that involved the distribution of coins to participants or other believers based locally or in distant communities. In these games, participants were supposed to use a die to determine who would get the coins. However, as anonymous players, they could override the die and give coins to whomever they wished. For both games, participants were more likely to play by the rules and dole out more coins to distant believers if they reported that their gods knew about people's thoughts and behaviour, and punished for wrongdoing. 
  
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Output:
The belief in all-seeing and punitive gods may be a huge factor in how modern civilization came to be. So report researchers in the journal Nature after studying nearly 600 individuals from eight communities, including plant cultivators on the South Pacific island of Tanna, wage laborers on Fiji and in Brazil, herders and wage laborers in Siberia, and East African hunter-gatherers. Using a behavioral game involving a cup and dice, the researchers found that people were more likely to reward strangers in a distant land over themselves if they thought their actions were being monitored from on high. That proved especially true if the strangers shared their religious beliefs. The upshot is that these beliefs make people more likely to cooperate with those outside their immediate social circles, and perhap explains how "far-flung peoples" came together, say the researchers in a press release. "A large part of the success of human civilizations may have lain in the hands of the gods, whether or not they are real," writes an evolutionary biologist in Nature. As Science News explains, this tendency to cooperate with strangers would have had huge implications starting about 10,000 years ago as primitive communities began to have more contact with each other. In the study, the stronger the belief in a punishing god, the greater the likelihood was for rewarding distant strangers, reports ABC Science. The researchers theorize that this is why Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, all of which include what Science News calls "divine discipline," have spread so successfully. Their adherents made sure to work with each other. (Rich Americans, meanwhile, are less charitable as a percentage of their income.)