Cultural selection shaped psychology to read supernatural-belief cues for trustworthiness

Evidence

The dilemma of the traveling salesman is essentially the main problem of large, anonymous societies, where strangers have opportunities to interact with each other; mutual trust is beneficial to everyone, as they all reap the rewards of cooperation. Not trusting at all is worse, but not as costly as trusting the freerider or the cheater. This dilemma is behind the cultural selection pressures that have led people to calibrate their psychology to particular culturally learned cues that reliably discriminate cooperators from freeriders and cheats. One such powerful cue is whether or not a stranger believes herself to be under supernatural surveillance. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Core mechanism for the reader’s thesis: supernatural-surveillance belief is the calibrated trust cue. An authority forcing public apostasy dismantles exactly this cue among believers. — connects to: Learners adopt causally opaque cultural practices through implicit trust in accumulated wisdom — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 376; Natural selection shaped psychological mechanisms that determine which cultural beliefs persist. — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 3
• QUESTION: Does the reader’s fumi-e argument require distinguishing between genuine surveillance belief and strategically displayed surveillance belief? The trampling breaks display credibility—worth pinning down.