Subliminal God reminders increase costly punishment of free-riders among religious believers.

Evidence

In another instructive study, Ryan McKay and his colleagues went further and probed whether thoughts of God, flashed subliminally, would affect another prosocial tendency that is an important feature of prosocial religious groups: the willingness to punish the unfair behavior of others even at a cost to oneself. Swiss participants played an economic game where they were offered a certain amount of money, which they could either keep or offer to others. They found that when religious participants were given the opportunity to punish others who were playing selfishly, religious reminders increased the willingness to punish these freeriders while incurring a monetary cost. This finding is important: it implies that members of prosocial religions are willing to pay a cost to punish noncooperators. This gives us one important mechanism by which fairness norms can be stabilized in large anonymous groups. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s core analytical project: costly punishment of religious defectors is exactly what partner-choice and Big God mechanisms predict — surfaces why inquisitorial mechanisms like the fumi-e trampling would be designed to trigger such costly displays.
• SEED: Angle for a piece on religious defection tests as costly-signaling mechanisms — how public apostasy demands (trampling, renunciation) function as economy-of-punishment screens.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 143