Supernatural watcher fear evolved because gossip made exposure costly

Evidence

Johnson and Bering point out that the fear of supernatural watchers emerged in response to the ability that humans developed to communicate information about reputations. In an intensely social, gossiping species such as ours, individual survival has heavily depended on cooperative group-living. With the advent of capacities for theory of mind, coupled with language, which allows for communication to absent parties, people were able to detect and transmit social transgressions to other group members. Committing selfish actions would have therefore risked detection by the social group, which could have led to punishment, resulting in loss of Darwinian fitness. The wholesale suppression of selfish behavior would therefore become ultimately adaptive at the individual level. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 442

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Perfect complement to the reader’s partner-choice strand: public trampling of the fumi-e weaponizes exactly this gossip/exposure mechanism, converting private transgression into social detection.

Related

• Supernatural watcher fears emerged to police reputation in a gossiping species (similarity 0.93)
• Supernatural watcher beliefs check selfish behavior once social worlds grew transparent (similarity 0.88)
• Costly belief in supernatural watchers evolved to prevent worse social-detection errors (similarity 0.82)
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups (similarity 0.80)
• Supernatural punishment psychology is agreed upon despite evolutionary disputes (similarity 0.80)
• Belief in supernatural watchers depends on both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies (similarity 0.79)
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse. (similarity 0.79)
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous (similarity 0.78)
• Supernatural belief works through the same surveillance mechanism that generates prosocial behavior (similarity 0.78)
• Large anonymous groups need supernatural monitoring to avoid splintering (similarity 0.78)