God is a particularly effective threat precisely because He sees everything even when the rest of us might not. This is one obvious suggestion for the switch from having no gods (or, perhaps, having many little gods only interested in receiving offerings at their shrines) to having a single omniscient, all-powerful Moralizing High God who takes an active interest in human affairs and punishes those who step out of line. One study used a standard cross-cultural sample of ethnographic and historical societies that contained over a thousand variables to test whether this suggestion really worked. It seemed that having a Moralizing High God did make it more likely that the members of a society would be socially compliant in terms of willingness to pay taxes, lend money to each other and accept the presence of a police force and other secular means of sanctioning backsliders. There was, however, no evidence that a belief in a Moralizing High God was associated with the size of the tribe as a whole or the size of the community in which individuals typically lived (that is, the village or hunting camp), or with the level of conflict either with external neighbours or within the community itself – something that others have suggested might be the case.