Round up: Does religiosity reduce crime?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

The Collector Hypothesis: Who Benefits More from Art, the Artist or the Collector? Piotr Sorokowski and colleagues test the “collector hypothesis” as an evolutionary explanation for human fascination with art. According to the hypothesis, collections of artworks serve as costly signals of the collector’s social status. The authors find preliminary supporting evidence in a study of indigenous Papuan communities.

The freedom to believe in free will: Evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral genetics. Emily Willoughby and colleagues examine the heritability of beliefs about free will and determinism. Analysing data on individuals from adoptive and biological families, they reach the surprising result that such beliefs are weakly or not at all heritable. Rather, the variance is overwhelmingly due to the non-shared environment.

ACE variance decomposition for beliefs in free will and determinism.