Attitudes concerning national identity (e.g., nationalism, patriotism) are known to correlate with various social behaviorssuch as party preferences in voting. For instance, survey data indicates that Japanese citizens who are proud of beingJapanese (i.e., patriots) and those who are high in a right-wing tendency are more willing to vote for the conservative party(Liberal Democratic Party). In this study, we employed an agent-based modeling approach to understand how nationalidentity affects individual voting intentions. The individual agents and the political party agents interacted with each otherby spreading their political attitudes (e.g., VAT should be increased to maintain the pension insurance system), and therecipients of the messages changed their attitudes (e.g., persuasion). The simulation revealed that the effects of persuasivemessages were moderated by the strength of its own national identity attitudes, and the resultant individual agents votingpreferences simulated the human participants data more precisely.

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples. In this study, the cross-cultural comparability of the scale was tested across 28 different cultural groups worldwide through measurement invariance tests. A series of exact invariance tests marginally supported partial metric invariance, however, an approximate invariance approach provided evidence of partial scalar invariance for a 5-item measure. The established level of measurement invariance allows for comparisons of latent means across cultures. We conclude that the brief measure of moral vitalism is invariant across 28 cultures and can be used to estimate levels of moral vitalism with the same precision across very different cultural settings.

Pathogens represent a significant threat to human health leading to the emergence of strategies designed to help manage their negative impact. We examined how spiritual beliefs developed to explain and predict the devastating effects of pathogens and spread of infectious disease. Analysis of existing data in studies 1 and 2 suggests that moral vitalism (beliefs about spiritual forces of evil) is higher in geographical regions characterized by historical higher levels of pathogens. Furthermore, drawing on a sample of 3140 participants from 28 countries in study 3, we found that historical higher levels of pathogens were associated with stronger endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs. Furthermore, endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs statistically mediated the previously reported relationship between pathogen prevalence and conservative ideologies, suggesting these beliefs reinforce behavioural strategies which function to prevent infection. We conclude that moral vitalism may be adaptive: by emphasizing concerns over contagion, it provided an explanatory model that enabled human groups to reduce rates of contagious disease.