Secular government institutions can prime prosocial generosity as effectively as religious ideas

Evidence

It turns out that some of the most cooperative, trusting, and well-to-do societies on earth, such as those in Western Europe and Scandinavia, are also the least religious in the world and the most reliant on the government. In these societies there is a very high level of trust, and people who live in societies with strong rule of law show much stronger cooperative tendencies than those who live in places with weak rule of law. In priming experiments, Azim Shariff and I have found that subtle exposure to words such as police and judge increased generosity between strangers as much as God-related words did. The same secular notions ruptured the mental connection between religion and morality. One of the strengths of a cultural evolutionary explanation of religion—the backbone of the argument in this book—is that it accommodates this significant and far-reaching fact: not only religions take different forms in different cultures and historical periods, but levels of religious commitment wax and wane in a predictable fashion, depending on the social conditions that exist in particular cultures at particular times. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 559

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s Norenzayan integration: if police/judge words substitute for God words in priming generosity, then Japanese authorities who drape themselves in shogunal legal authority are co-opting the same Big God cognitive mechanism Rodrigues relies on — a substitution the reader’s analytical bridge can use.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Police and judge as secular Big Gods’ — how state authority hijacks the same cognitive machinery religion uses, and what that means for when institutional trust collapses (Japan’s sakoku, post-Soviet Russia).

Related

• Priming police and judge boosts generosity as much as God words do. (similarity 0.93)
• Secular institutions and watchful gods are interchangeable in enforcing cooperation and trust (similarity 0.85)
• Religious belief only boosts prosociality where state institutions are weak (similarity 0.83)
• Religious prosocial effects are muted where secular institutions already generate trust. (similarity 0.83)
• Secular moral authority primes generosity as much as God does. (similarity 0.82)
• Secular authority primes increase stranger generosity as much as religious primes do. (similarity 0.82)
• Outside WEIRD societies only religious ties extend cooperation beyond kin groups (similarity 0.81)
• Religious priming produces generosity biased toward ingroup members (similarity 0.81)
• Gods and governments may be interchangeable enforcers of cooperation (similarity 0.80)
• Religious belief withers when governments provide the cooperation religion once supplied. (similarity 0.80)
• Secular government functions as a continuation of religious authority by other means (similarity 0.80)
• Secular institutions substitute for supernatural monitoring by enabling trust in strangers. (similarity 0.79)
• Secular institutions substitute for Big Gods by enforcing stranger cooperation (similarity 0.79)
• Secular governments and religious belief serve interchangeable functions, so strong states supplant gods. (similarity 0.79)
• Strong secular institutions can substitute for watchful gods in enforcing morality. (similarity 0.79)