Religious belief stems from both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission mechanisms.
Evidence
The scientific project of explaining religion can make great progress when we appreciate that the workings of human minds belong to cultural inheritance as much as to genetic inheritance. Belief in supernatural watchers is no exception. Devoted followers of prosocial religions rely on mental mechanisms that make gods an intuitive concept. But they also heavily lean on cultural learning mechanisms that enable particular cultural variants of religious beliefs and practices to rapidly propagate across minds. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 123
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Belief in supernatural watchers depends on both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission (similarity 0.95)
- Ordinary cognition, not special modules, produces religious beliefs (similarity 0.88)
- Atheism lacks the intuitive support that religious belief enjoys. (similarity 0.87)
- Religious belief rests on ordinary cognition that predates motivational influence. (similarity 0.86)
- Religious belief persists through multiple independent sustaining mechanisms (similarity 0.86)
- Religious disbelief is linked to a stable analytic cognitive style. (similarity 0.85)
- Religious belief cannot be understood apart from secular authority structures (similarity 0.85)
- Cultural learning biases explain passionate commitment to some gods but not others (similarity 0.85)
- Religious belief is a by-product of cognitive predispositions, not an evolved adaptation (similarity 0.84)
- Religious faith is sustained by multiple independent psychological flames (similarity 0.83)
- Mildly counterintuitive content boosts cultural transmission of ideas (similarity 0.83)
- Supernatural beliefs require cultural commitment to become religion, not just cognitive content. (similarity 0.83)
- Belief-as-accident and belief-as-glue are rival traditions that need integration. (similarity 0.83)
- Memorability alone cannot explain which supernatural agents get worshipped (similarity 0.83)
- Religious cues harness situational power where secular institutions are absent (similarity 0.83)