Moralizing supernatural agents help sustain cooperation at scales beyond natural limits

Evidence

The anthropologist Donald Tuzin reports on the historical emergence of an anomalous village of 1,500 people, and explains how additional cultural norms sustaining social organization, marriage, rituals, and morally involved supernatural agents converged to galvanize cooperation in a locale where this scale was previously unknown. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 413

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Direct causal evidence that morally-involved supernatural agents are the cultural add-on that breaks the 300-person ceiling — the exact mechanism the reader is testing against the fumi-e.

Related

• Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies (similarity 0.83)
• Belief in supernatural watchers enables stranger-to-stranger cooperation (similarity 0.83)
• Small transparent groups sustain cooperation without moralizing supernatural agents (similarity 0.83)
• Small transparent groups need no moralizing gods to sustain cooperation (similarity 0.82)
• Large anonymous groups need supernatural monitoring to avoid splintering (similarity 0.82)
• Big Gods and large-scale cooperation mutually reinforced each other’s expansion (similarity 0.82)
• Big God belief enabled group cooperation that agriculture alone could not achieve. (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural agents’ minimal counterintuitiveness explains their cultural advantage (similarity 0.81)
• Big God religion and large-scale cooperation co-evolved in feedback (similarity 0.80)
• Supernatural monitoring by any religion can extend trust beyond one’s own community (similarity 0.80)
• Omniscient watchful gods enabled cooperation among anonymous strangers (similarity 0.80)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.80)
• Big Gods historically bound anonymous strangers together where courts and police were absent (similarity 0.80)
• Religious belief withers when governments provide the cooperation religion once supplied. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Big God religion and large-scale cooperation co-evolved in feedback #corroborates (0.94) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 43
• Supernatural watchers and rituals jointly forged large-scale moral communities #corroborates (0.93) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 49
• Large-scale cooperation and religion’s endurance explain each other #corroborates (0.90) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 653
• Big Gods and costly rituals coevolved to enhance cooperation and outcompete rivals #expands (0.90) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 431
• Belief in supernatural watchers evolved as an adaptive guard against selfishness #corroborates (0.88) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 441
• Supernatural belief works through the same surveillance mechanism that generates prosocial behavior #expands (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 64
• Trust in impartial institutions substitutes for supernatural monitoring of strangers. #qualifies (0.82) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 553
• Egoistic motivations alone cannot sustain cooperation without plausible self-regulating structures #qualifies (0.78) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 215