Resource conflict, large groups, and watchful gods co-occur across world societies.

Evidence

For example, in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (discussed earlier), prevalence of conflict among societies, resource-rich environments, group size, and Big Gods all go together. In places with rich natural resources, there is more intergroup conflict, larger groups, and watchful gods. What causes what is not always easy to know, but one possibility is that conflict over resources led to competition and political expansion of victorious groups, which in turn festered more conflict at the peripheries of these expanding empires. One argument is that these were precisely the antecedent conditions that gave rise to politically centralized states. As Charles Tilly puts it, war made states, and states made war. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 473

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s integration of Baumard’s partner-choice account: here conflict, not partner choice alone, drives Big God emergence alongside group size.

Related

• Warfare and resource competition drove the rise of large groups and Big Gods (similarity 0.88)
• Group size predicts Big Gods independent of stratification and missionary contact (similarity 0.85)
• Big God belief enabled group cooperation that agriculture alone could not achieve. (similarity 0.84)
• Big Gods were necessary but not sufficient for group expansion. (similarity 0.83)
• Big Gods prevalence should increase with group size (similarity 0.82)
• Agricultural societies favor doctrinal rituals and moralistic Big Gods (similarity 0.82)
• Big Gods and large-scale cooperation mutually reinforced each other’s expansion (similarity 0.82)
• Big God prosocial religions contributed to, not merely resulted from, large-scale societies (similarity 0.82)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization (similarity 0.81)
• Elaborate rituals and monuments co-emerge with larger complex societies (similarity 0.81)
• Costly rites mobilize male solidarity and spread culturally through intergroup competition. (similarity 0.80)
• As groups grow, moral enforcement and religion become intertwined. (similarity 0.79)
• Moralizing gods and costly rituals coevolved to boost in-group cooperation and out-compete rivals. (similarity 0.79)
• Written records reveal religions evolving toward moralizing Big Gods with scale (similarity 0.79)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Supernatural watchers and rituals jointly forged large-scale moral communities #expands (0.90) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 49
• Big Gods and costly rituals coevolved to enhance cooperation and outcompete rivals #expands (0.88) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 431
• Group expansion drives religion toward moral, demanding, interventionist gods #expands (0.87) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 450
• Group size predicts Big Gods independent of stratification and missionary contact #expands (0.85) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 418
• Large-scale cooperation and religion’s endurance explain each other #expands (0.82) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 653
• Gods and governments may be interchangeable enforcers of cooperation #corroborates (0.80) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 302
• Agricultural societies favor doctrinal rituals and moralistic Big Gods #qualifies (0.78) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 427
• The social scale a religion can bind grows with the deity’s remoteness #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 5766