Priming police and judge boosts generosity as much as God words do.

Evidence

It turns out that some of the most cooperative, trusting, and well-to-do societies on earth, such as those in Western Europe and Scandinavia, are also the least religious in the world and the most reliant on the government. In these societies there is a very high level of trust, and people who live in societies with strong rule of law show much stronger cooperative tendencies than those who live in places with weak rule of law. In priming experiments, Azim Shariff and I have found that subtle exposure to words such as police and judge increased generosity between strangers as much as God-related words did. The same secular notions ruptured the mental connection between religion and morality. One of the strengths of a cultural evolutionary explanation of religion—the backbone of the argument in this book—is that it accommodates this significant and far-reaching fact: not only religions take different forms in different cultures and historical periods, but levels of religious commitment wax and wane in a predictable fashion, depending on the social conditions that exist in particular cultures at particular times. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 559

Categorization

• XREF: The police/judge priming finding is the empirical pivot for the reader’s secular-Big-Brother analytic frame—secular institutions can capture the omniscient-watcher function religion serves.
• QUESTION: Would the fumi-e’s secular authority (the Japanese state forcing trampling) have had the same coercive power as Rodrigues’ internalized sacred watcher? The passage suggests secular priming works, complicating the apostasy scene.