Prosocial religions produce large-scale cooperation and then spread culturally

Evidence

The basic outline of an argument is emerging that simultaneously answers two of the biggest scientific enigmas about humanity: (1) Exactly how and why have some religious beliefs and practices galvanized the large-scale cooperative societies of the last ten millennia? (2) How did these processes in turn lead to the cultural spread of prosocial religions and colonize the minds of the majority of the world? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 56

Categorization

• XREF: Core mechanism statement aligning with the reader’s Big God/partner-choice framework: prosocial belief galvanizes cooperation, then spreads — the causal engine behind Rodrigues’ context. — connects to: Organized religion was the first great claimant on human attention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 82