Religious groups outsourced monitoring to gods and outcompeted rivals

Evidence

By working upward from the mutually reinforcing sets of psychological mechanisms discussed in chapters 2 through 6, it becomes clear why such prosocial religious groups, by outsourcing social monitoring duties to supernatural watchers, built trust among religiously committed strangers and expanded and spread throughout the globe at the expense of rival groups. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 53

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The intergroup-competition claim is the mechanism the reader will test against the Japanese authorities’ deliberate destruction of the priests’ prosocial signaling — expulsion of the watchful-god mechanism from the community.

Related

• As groups grow, moral enforcement and religion become intertwined. (similarity 0.84)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization (similarity 0.84)
• Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers (similarity 0.83)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.83)
• Social monitoring breaks down as group size grows, enabling religion’s rise. (similarity 0.83)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare (similarity 0.82)
• Religious hypocrisy threatens to dissolve prosocial groups through free-riding impostors (similarity 0.82)
• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.82)
• CRED-backed belief spreads via transmission advantage and outcompetes rival groups (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring by any religion can extend trust beyond one’s own community (similarity 0.82)
• Moralizing gods and costly rituals coevolved to boost in-group cooperation and out-compete rivals. (similarity 0.81)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.81)
• Freeloading hypocrites must be screened out or prosocial religious groups collapse (similarity 0.81)
• Supernatural beliefs both motivate and signal prosocial intention across social contexts (similarity 0.81)
• Big God religions create social boundaries excluding outsiders through supernatural monitoring. (similarity 0.81)