Religious hypocrisy threatens to dissolve prosocial groups through free-riding impostors

Evidence

So far, I have argued that (1) watched people are nice people, and (2) people who sincerely believe that they are being watched, are, in turn, trusted more. Together, these two observations can go a long way in explaining how cooperation can evolve among genetic strangers. However, there is a missing piece in this explanation. If belief in supernatural monitoring elicits more trust and cooperation, what would prevent religious hypocrites from faking belief in supernatural monitors to get into the group and receive benefits without contributing? If there were no safeguards to keep these impostors in check, prosocial religious groups would be invaded by these selfish religious hypocrites, who would soon outnumber sincere believers. Group solidarity would soon fizzle out. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 323

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s analytical frame: the free-rider/hypocrisy problem is the missing mechanism that fumi-e rituals solve, connecting to Norenzayan’s own Big God and Baumard’s partner choice.

Related

• Freeloading hypocrites must be screened out or prosocial religious groups collapse (similarity 0.91)
• Religious groups outsourced monitoring to gods and outcompeted rivals (similarity 0.82)
• Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers (similarity 0.82)
• Hard-to-fake devotion rituals screened out religious freeloaders (similarity 0.81)
• Prosocial religions succeeded by bundling several psychological mechanisms into religious solidarity (similarity 0.80)
• Religious trust extends to any outgroup holding supernatural sanctioning beliefs (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse (similarity 0.79)
• Social monitoring breaks down as group size grows, enabling religion’s rise. (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.79)
• Social monitoring alone cannot sustain cooperation in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.79)
• Religious prosocial effects are muted where secular institutions already generate trust. (similarity 0.79)
• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.78)
• Costly religious displays evolved as honest signals of group commitment. (similarity 0.78)
• As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities (similarity 0.78)