Big God religion and large-scale cooperation co-evolved in feedback

Evidence

We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 4 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Big God belief enabled group cooperation that agriculture alone could not achieve.; Moralizing supernatural agents help sustain cooperation at scales beyond natural limits; Group size predicts Big Gods independent of stratification and missionary contact — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 418 (+9 more)

Related

• Big God belief enabled group cooperation that agriculture alone could not achieve. (similarity 0.87)
• Big Gods and large-scale cooperation mutually reinforced each other’s expansion (similarity 0.85)
• Group size predicts Big Gods independent of stratification and missionary contact (similarity 0.84)
• Daily communal prayer predicts greater cooperation in public goods games (similarity 0.83)
• Big God participation raises economic game offers by 6 to 10 percentile points (similarity 0.83)
• Small transparent groups need no moralizing gods to sustain cooperation (similarity 0.83)
• Neither kin selection nor reciprocal altruism can explain large-scale human cooperation. (similarity 0.82)
• Moralizing supernatural agents help sustain cooperation at scales beyond natural limits (similarity 0.81)
• Moralizing gods and costly rituals coevolved to boost in-group cooperation and out-compete rivals. (similarity 0.81)
• Big Gods were necessary but not sufficient for group expansion. (similarity 0.80)
• Prosocial religious groups outcompeted rivals through internal cooperation. (similarity 0.80)
• Big God prosocial religions contributed to, not merely resulted from, large-scale societies (similarity 0.80)
• Big Gods historically bound anonymous strangers together where courts and police were absent (similarity 0.79)
• Prosocial religions produce large-scale cooperation and then spread culturally (similarity 0.79)
• Omniscient watchful gods enabled cooperation among anonymous strangers (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The social scale a religion can bind grows with the deity’s remoteness #expands (0.85)
• Daily communal prayer predicts greater cooperation in public goods games #exemplifies (0.80)
• Morality evolved because fair partners were preferred in cooperative interactions #corroborates (0.70) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 4