Belief in any moralizing deity signals trustworthiness to strangers

Evidence

This often-quoted statement attracted Weber’s curiosity. It has generated much discussion about religion and trust in America, but what is remarkable is that the salesman is not saying that he would only trust someone who belongs to his own church. After all, that kind of rule, while useful for someone who has no compelling incentive to interact with strangers, would be rather meaningless for a traveling salesman. The dilemma of the traveling salesman is that earning his living depends on trading with strangers, but the challenge is to sort out the trustworthy ones among the countless new faces he will meet every day. Believing in something, even if that something is different from what I believe in, can be taken as an indication that this person can be trusted, as long as that “something” places the individual under some kind of moral constraint. It is this kind of trust that pervaded business relationships among unrelated businessmen in early America. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 210

Categorization

• XREF: Strengthens the reader’s framework: it is not shared beliefs but a felt moral constraint—surveillance—that functions as the partner-choice cue a fumi-e would destroy.