Belief acquisition depends on who is believed more than what is believed.

Evidence

Having explained how cultural evolution favored extravagant religious displays of commitment, I now turn to another riddle that has challenged cognitive scientists of religion: why do some supernatural agents attract passionate devotion (such as belief in Jesus or Allah), while others are merely the object of fantasy (fairies), fiction (Santa Claus for adults), or even amusement (Zeus who once was a powerful god who no longer is)? Any explanation of how people come to be “true believers” ought to help us understand not just how people think about supernatural agents, but how it is that these true believers come to passionately commit to some deities but not others. To get answers, we must turn, once again, to the cultural learning biases that influence peoples’ tendency to selectively acquire beliefs from some people but not others, even when the content of beliefs is similar. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 354

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the cultural learning-bias mechanism that distinguishes true-belief deities from fairies/fiction deities.
• FICTION: The fumi-e scene in Silence hinges on exactly this cultural-learning mechanism — apostasy under coercion breaks the credibility chain, not the doctrinal content itself.