Cultural learning biases explain passionate commitment to some gods but not others

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

• XREF: connects to: Learners adopt causally opaque cultural practices through implicit trust in accumulated wisdom — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 376; Prestige status emerges from second-order cultural learning cues, not verified skill — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 393