People represent gods using the same mental machinery as human observers.

Evidence

If the most subtle of monitoring cues—such as dots arranged to look like schematic faces—can change social behavior, it is no surprise that the presence of actual human observers affects prosocial tendencies. The evidence is clear that various forms of social monitoring are a key factor in encouraging nice behavior among strangers. As we have seen earlier, people mentally represent supernatural monitors—gods and other supernatural beings—in ways that are strikingly similar (though certainly not identical) to the ways they think about monitoring human beings. Social monitoring is the precursor of supernatural monitoring, one of the key features of prosocial religions. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 93

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The gods-as-human-monitors representation is the psychological bridge the reader wants for Rodrigues’s internalized divine gaze.

Related

• People apply the same mental machinery to supernatural watchers as human watchers (similarity 0.94)
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware (similarity 0.86)
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse (similarity 0.84)
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous (similarity 0.84)
• Supernatural watcher gods extend an intuitive human social-monitoring faculty. (similarity 0.84)
• Gods who see everything derive from humans who watch each other (similarity 0.83)
• Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods (similarity 0.82)
• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.82)
• Potent supernatural monitors must balance transcendence with human-like graspability (similarity 0.81)
• Mentalizing enables believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.80)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.80)
• Belief in supernatural watchers depends on both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission (similarity 0.80)
• Supernatural watcher beliefs check selfish behavior once social worlds grew transparent (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural belief works through the same surveillance mechanism that generates prosocial behavior (similarity 0.79)