Demographic success of prosocial religions explains their global prevalence today
Evidence
Over historical time, demographic and cultural patterns have favored prosocial religious groups. This is why most of human beings today live in, or are the cultural descendants of, these highly successful prosocial religions. The cooperative effects of religious participation in these large anonymous groups are one piece of the explanation. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 484
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
Related
- Religious groups expand through higher fertility rates, not just persuasion (similarity 0.85)
- Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization (similarity 0.85)
- Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.83)
- Prosocial religions produce large-scale cooperation and then spread culturally (similarity 0.83)
- Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare (similarity 0.82)
- Prosocial religions helped groups scale up, especially in intense borderland conflict (similarity 0.82)
- Religious prosocial beliefs may have shaped human genetic evolution (similarity 0.82)
- Religious priming boosts prosocial behavior only for believers, not non-believers. (similarity 0.82)
- Only prosocial religions function as moral systems across history (similarity 0.82)
- Religious behavior depends on situational context, observable action, and intergroup competition (similarity 0.82)
- Prosocial religions spread during the same Holocene period as large-group rise. (similarity 0.81)
- Religious survival advantage resists explanation by individual or genetic selection (similarity 0.81)
- Secularization predictions failed; most people across societies remain deeply religious. (similarity 0.81)
- Religion is historically the primary motivator of prosociality among strangers. (similarity 0.81)
- High fertility plus conversion, not doctrine, make world religions (similarity 0.81)