Prosocial religions spread during the same Holocene period as large-group rise.

Evidence

Now let’s go back to the first puzzle that I started with: the worldwide spread of prosocial religions also during the Holocene, the same historical period that saw the rise of large groups. If you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or even an agnostic or atheist descendant of any of these traditions, you are heir to an extraordinarily successful religious movement that started as an obscure cultural experiment. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 40

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: Links directly to the reader’s core question: a prosocial religion binding strangers would be precisely what the Japanese fumi-e ritual was designed to shatter.

Related

• Prosocial religions produce large-scale cooperation and then spread culturally (similarity 0.83)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization (similarity 0.83)
• Prosocial religions helped groups scale up, especially in intense borderland conflict (similarity 0.82)
• Demographic success of prosocial religions explains their global prevalence today (similarity 0.81)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare (similarity 0.80)
• Prosocial religions succeeded by bundling several psychological mechanisms into religious solidarity (similarity 0.80)
• Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers (similarity 0.80)
• Chronic, communal, in-group religious practice drives the prosociality effect (similarity 0.80)
• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.80)
• Proselytizing religions both created large-scale cooperation and spread globally (similarity 0.79)
• As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.78)