Religious extravagance functions as naturally selected honest signaling of group commitment

Evidence

In this view, a signal is reliable only to the extent that it is costlier to fake by potential freeloaders than for cooperators. If religious groups are cooperative groups, what would prevent selfish imposters from faking prosocial intent, receiving cooperative benefits without reciprocating? Because mere professions of religious belief can be easily faked, evolutionary pressures have favored costly religious displays that are not subject to rational calculations of cost-benefit analysis. Thus, costly religious behaviors are seen as naturally selected honest signals that reliably advertise the unobservable trait of group commitment. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 340

Categorization

• XREF: The fumi-e trampling can be read as the inverse: authority forcing a low-cost public apostasy act (stepping on an image) to destroy the costly signal of commitment, directly paralleling the reader’s partner-choice/Big God framework.
• DEFINE: Defines costly signaling theory’s core mechanism — signal reliability via fake-cost asymmetry.