Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse.

Evidence

Whereas the ideomotor hypothesis posits that the link between religion and prosociality is the consequence of a cultural association, the supernatural monitoring hypothesis speaks to the more basic question of why religion might cause large-scale anonymous prosociality in the first place. If people are less prone to selfishly cheat the system when they feel watched, then beliefs in moralizing gods, who can monitor social interactions even when no humans are watching, may have been instrumental in promoting large-scale human cooperation. Once these supernatural monitors culturally spread in human populations, and practices and institutions were built to promote them, repeated activation of thoughts related to them would have led to the habitual and unconscious cognitive associations between these thoughts and prosocial behaviors, exactly as predicted by the ideomotor hypothesis. Therefore, it is more plausible that ideomotor associations between God and prosociality were the consequence of belief in supernatural monitoring, rather than being a cause. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 175

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Core to the reader’s Norenzayan-Baumard integration: the causal ordering claim (monitoring first, cultural association second) distinguishes the Big God mechanism from a mere semantic priming effect, which the fumi-e reading depends on.

Related

• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse (similarity 0.93)
• Supernatural belief works through the same surveillance mechanism that generates prosocial behavior (similarity 0.87)
• Supernatural punishment explains religion’s prosocial effects better than ideomotor priming (similarity 0.87)
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous (similarity 0.87)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.86)
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware (similarity 0.85)
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.83)
• Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods (similarity 0.83)
• Supernatural beliefs both motivate and signal prosocial intention across social contexts (similarity 0.83)
• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods (similarity 0.82)
• Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies (similarity 0.82)
• Religious priming effects are testable against the ideomotor alternative (similarity 0.82)
• People represent gods using the same mental machinery as human observers. (similarity 0.82)
• Ideomotor accounts predict kind Gods matter while watcher accounts predict punishing ones (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural watcher gods extend an intuitive human social-monitoring faculty. (similarity 0.82)