Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization

Evidence

This ancient imperative can help us understand the dramatic rise of prosocial religious groups that assembled through historical time and spread around the world via population expansions, conversions, and conquest, taking their beliefs and practices with them. They outcompeted rival groups that were smaller and had lower rates of social solidarity. Turchin’s analysis predicts that, historically, prosocial religions played a key role in the scaling up of groups, particularly in borderland areas where conflict was most intense, an idea that remains untested. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 479

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core thesis linking Norenzayan’s Big God mechanism (via Turchin’s borderland-conflict prediction) to the Rodrigues novel’s context of religious competition between Christian and Japanese authorities. — connects to: Organized religion was the first great claimant on human attention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 82