Supernatural watcher beliefs check selfish behavior once social worlds grew transparent

Evidence

Humans may gain a fitness advantage from a bias in which they tend to assume that their every move (and thought) is being watched, judged, and potentially punished by supernatural agents. Although such a belief would be costly because it constrains freedom of action and self-interested behaviors, it may nevertheless be favored by natural selection if it helps to avoid an error that is even worse: committing selfish actions or violations of social norms when there is a high probability of real-world detection and punishment by victims or other group members. Simply put, supernatural beliefs may have been an effective mindguard against excessively selfish behaviour—behavior that became especially risky and costly as our social world became increasingly transparent due to the evolution of language and theory of mind. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 441

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Big God mechanism: the perceived omniscient observer enforcing moral behavior underlies Rodrigues’ experience of God’s gaze.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that fear of supernatural exposure substitutes evolutionarily for fear of real-world gossip detection is a dense, original-seeming inversion worth sitting with.