Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers

Evidence

This cluster of mechanisms—synchronous movement and music, self-regulation, and fictive kinship, together with credible displays of faith in Big Gods who monitor and intervene, can be seen as the ingredients of religious solidarity and the creation of prosocial religions as communities that extends the boundaries of moral concern beyond genetic relatives and reciprocating partners to complete strangers. In the next two chapters, I explain how this potent mix, packaged together by the rapid forces of cultural evolution, gave prosocial religious groups a competitive edge in the harsh race for cultural survival. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 386

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• ADDENDUM: Directly feeds the reader’s sacrifice analysis: prosocial religion’s competitive edge is the extension of moral concern to strangers, and the fumi-e’s public defilement would destroy precisely this solidarity by signaling expulsion from the kin-like group.
• DEEPTHINKING: Norenzayan’s synthesis names the full ingredient list — synchrony, self-regulation, fictive kinship, Big God monitoring — as necessary components for the stranger-extending moral community; the fumi-e is a targeted attack on several ingredients at once.

Related

• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.94)
• Prosocial religions succeeded by bundling several psychological mechanisms into religious solidarity (similarity 0.91)
• As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities (similarity 0.84)
• Extending moral concern to anonymous strangers was originally a religious achievement. (similarity 0.84)
• Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies (similarity 0.83)
• Religious groups outsourced monitoring to gods and outcompeted rivals (similarity 0.83)
• Moral judgments serve group cohesion, not abstract individual reasoning (similarity 0.82)
• Religious hypocrisy threatens to dissolve prosocial groups through free-riding impostors (similarity 0.82)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.82)
• Religious practices assembled by cultural evolution, not genetic adaptations (similarity 0.82)
• Prosociality arises from many sources besides religious supernatural monitoring (similarity 0.81)
• As groups grow, moral enforcement and religion become intertwined. (similarity 0.81)
• Omniscient watchful gods enabled cooperation among anonymous strangers (similarity 0.81)
• Big Gods and large-scale cooperation mutually reinforced each other’s expansion (similarity 0.80)