Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods

Abstract

Whitehouse, et al.1 have recently used the Seshat archaeo-historical databank2 to argue that beliefs in moralizing gods appear in world history only after the formation of complex “megasocieties” of 30 around one million people. Inspection of the authors’ data, however, shows that 61% of Seshat data points on moralizing gods are missing values, mostly from smaller populations below one million people, and during the analysis the authors re-coded these data points to signify the absence of moralizing gods beliefs. When we confine the analysis only to the extant data or use various standard imputation methods, the reported finding is reversed: moralizing gods precede increases in social complexity. We suggest that the reported “megasociety threshold” for the emergence of moralizing gods is thus solely a consequence of the decision to re-code nearly two-thirds of Seshat data from unknown values to known absences of moralizing go