Belief in a supernatural monitor lowers the cost of trusting strangers in trade networks

Evidence

One powerful tool (although certainly not the only one), no doubt, was a credible fear of a God, a God who knows and monitors moral behavior, and doles out rewards and punishments. Sincere belief in a Supernatural Monitor is like agreeing to be followed by a powerful judge, 24/7, 365 days a week! In addition, while human judges are prone to error and costly to the system, a supernatural judge is failsafe and comes for free. Strangers who showed sincere belief in being monitored were, therefore, more likely to be invited to join these networks and were trusted more. If people trust each other even when no one is monitoring them, then human monitoring mechanisms, which are costly and difficult to enforce, can be supplemented and reinforced with supernatural monitoring. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s stated integration goal: this is the Norenzayan Big God mechanism (omniscient gaze enforcing moral behavior) the reader wants to pair with Silence’s Rodrigues and Baumard’s partner-choice theory. — connects to: Mass markets forced consumers to trust unseen strangers and corporations — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2631
• ADDENDUM: Core mechanism load-bearing for the analytical bridge: supernatural judge as failsafe and free versus human judges as error-prone and costly directly parallels the fumi-e inversion the reader is tracing (religious authority weaponizing public display).