Belief in a watching God affects behavior only when consciously activated.

Evidence

The key to this puzzle can be found in the everyday workings (and failings) of the human mind. Even though God is omniscient and watches people 24/7, people aren’t thinking of Him 24/7. Believers have to think of God and His omniscience at any given moment if that belief is to have an impact on their actions. From a psychological perspective, there is little reason to expect a wholesale, unconditional association between religion and prosociality. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 151

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s analytical framework: the Big God mechanism only bites when salient, so the fumi-e ritual works precisely by forcing God’s omniscience to the foreground at the decisive moment.
• QUESTION: If believers aren’t thinking of God 24/7, what situational cues most reliably activate divine surveillance salience?

Related

• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind. (similarity 0.91)
• Beliefs change behavior only when they enter conscious awareness (similarity 0.88)
• Religion shapes behavior only when situational cues make it salient. (similarity 0.84)
• Omniscient God thoughts are situationally activated, not chronically present (similarity 0.83)
• Gods who see everything derive from humans who watch each other (similarity 0.83)
• Moral beliefs influence action only when momentarily cognitively salient, not merely held. (similarity 0.83)
• Believers implicitly represent even an omniscient God as having humanlike mental limits (similarity 0.81)
• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.81)
• God priming increases both generosity and felt watching only in believers (similarity 0.81)
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware (similarity 0.81)
• Supernatural watcher gods extend an intuitive human social-monitoring faculty. (similarity 0.81)
• Big God omniscience is not automatically and constantly effective on behavior (similarity 0.80)
• Priming reminders activate religious moral behavior; beliefs alone do not (similarity 0.80)
• Mentalizing enables believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.80)
• Believers distrust atheists because they doubt atheists feel watched by God. (similarity 0.80)