Social monitoring breaks down as group size grows, enabling religion’s rise.

Evidence

We saw that social monitoring is a powerful motivator in prosocial interactions. But it can go only so far. It depends on the actual or implied presence of others; it also depends on keeping track of others’ reputations, which is severely limited by group size. As the number of interactions increase, anonymity creeps back into the situation and reputational mechanisms break down. This is the key problem of large groups plagued by anonymity, and this is precisely why these large groups are always vulnerable to splintering or collapse unless additional processes arise to restore and maintain high levels of cooperation in these ever-larger groups. While social monitoring has ancient evolutionary roots and by all accounts predated religion, it came to serve as the basis of a supernatural solution to the problem of anonymity. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 94

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly grounds the reader’s analytical bridge: Big God mechanisms arise exactly where reputation-based monitoring (partner choice in Baumard et al.) fails, linking all three sources.
• QUESTION: How large must a group get before reputational breakdown outweighs the cost of maintaining a shared moral god? Any quantified threshold in the literature?

Related

• Social monitoring alone cannot sustain cooperation in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.90)
• Large anonymous groups need supernatural monitoring to avoid splintering (similarity 0.88)
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.86)
• As groups grow, moral enforcement and religion become intertwined. (similarity 0.86)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.84)
• Supernatural monitoring drove human groups to scale from small bands to vast societies (similarity 0.84)
• Big God prosocial religions contributed to, not merely resulted from, large-scale societies (similarity 0.83)
• Religious groups outsourced monitoring to gods and outcompeted rivals (similarity 0.83)
• Gods’ moral involvement grows with group size culturally (similarity 0.83)
• As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities (similarity 0.82)
• Big Gods and large-scale cooperation mutually reinforced each other’s expansion (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse (similarity 0.82)
• Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.81)
• Omniscient watchful gods enabled cooperation among anonymous strangers (similarity 0.81)