Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods

Evidence

The experimental studies reviewed earlier, as well as the Sunday Effect studies, indicate that temporary reminders of God increase generosity, cooperation, and costly punishment of selfishness, and decrease the temptation to cheat. I have argued that supernatural monitoring is one critical explanation. To the extent that thoughts of watchful gods weigh on the mind, people feel monitored, and as a result, behave more nicely toward strangers even when the situation is objectively anonymous. However, there is a different explanation that must be dealt with: the ideomotor account. These two accounts are not incompatible (both could be true), but they are distinguishable accounts. Here, I discuss the evidence for the supernatural monitoring explanation and compare it to the ideomotor account. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 157 (#expands, via linked claim)

Whereas the ideomotor hypothesis posits that the link between religion and prosociality is the consequence of a cultural association, the supernatural monitoring hypothesis speaks to the more basic question of why religion might cause large-scale anonymous prosociality in the first place. If people are less prone to selfishly cheat the system when they feel watched, then beliefs in moralizing gods, who can monitor social interactions even when no humans are watching, may have been instrumental in promoting large-scale human cooperation. Once these supernatural monitors culturally spread in human populations, and practices and institutions were built to promote them, repeated activation of thoughts related to them would have led to the habitual and unconscious cognitive associations between these thoughts and prosocial behaviors, exactly as predicted by the ideomotor hypothesis. Therefore, it is more plausible that ideomotor associations between God and prosociality were the consequence of belief in supernatural monitoring, rather than being a cause. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 175 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Autism-linked mentalizing deficits reduce belief in a personal God; Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods; Religious belief requires intuitive mentalizing about a personal God (+7 more)

Related

• Potent supernatural monitors must balance transcendence with human-like graspability (similarity 0.86)
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous (similarity 0.86)
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse (similarity 0.84)
• Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods (similarity 0.84)
• Supernatural belief works through the same surveillance mechanism that generates prosocial behavior (similarity 0.83)
• Mentalizing enables believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.83)
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware (similarity 0.83)
• Religious belief requires intuitive mentalizing about a personal God (similarity 0.82)
• People represent gods using the same mental machinery as human observers. (similarity 0.82)
• Autism-linked mentalizing deficits reduce belief in a personal God (similarity 0.81)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.81)
• Impaired mentalizing, not social isolation, explains atheism among autistics (similarity 0.80)
• Beliefs change behavior only when they enter conscious awareness (similarity 0.80)
• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind. (similarity 0.80)
• Anonymity leaves some prosocial residue but surveillance reliably amplifies it (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Religious belief requires intuitive mentalizing about a personal God #corroborates (0.90)
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous #expands (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 157
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse #responds-to (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 175
• The social scale a religion can bind grows with the deity’s remoteness #complicates (0.72)