Norenzayan, Ara — Big gods - how religion transformed cooperation and conflict

797 published claims from this book.

• A generalized anthropomorphism tendency does not predict belief in God among Christians
• A god’s deterrent effect scales with its perceived omniscience
• A goddess’s taste for coconuts generates massive daily demand for the fruit
• A highly cooperative society can shed religion within a century.
• A non-costly action can still credibly signal sincere belief.
• A religion’s violence depends on context, not inherent character
• Abrahamic scripture centers devotion on a God who sees everything always
• Abrahamic scripture’s defining trait is a God who observes all acts without exception.
• Acting in synchrony with others raises individual pain tolerance and self-control
• Adult social proof, not representability, sustains supernatural belief
• Agricultural societies correlate with doctrinal rituals; small foraging groups use imagistic ones
• Agricultural societies favor doctrinal rituals and moralistic Big Gods
• Agriculture harmed health yet spread because it fed more people.
• American atheist distrust stems from anomalous high religiosity
• American distrust of atheists significantly exceeds that of comparable wealthy democracies.
• Americans reject only atheist candidates, not racial and religious minorities.
• An unlikely mechanism reduces atheist distrust even among believers
• Analytic thinking primes people to overrule quick intuition-based answers.
• Analytic thinking style independently predicts lower religious belief.
• Ancient Chinese Mohists already deployed watchful supernatural punishment as social order
• Anonymity leaves some prosocial residue but surveillance reliably amplifies it
• Anthropomorphism is conditional and triggered, not automatic and promiscuous
• Anthropomorphism is selective and conditional, not automatic and promiscuous.
• Anti-atheist and anti-gay prejudice are rooted in different psychological sentiments.
• Anti-atheist and anti-gay prejudices have distinct distrust versus disgust profiles
• Anti-atheist bias is America’s one socially accepted prejudice
• Anti-atheist discrimination emerges only where trust in strangers matters
• Anti-atheist distrust stems from the belief that atheists lack supernatural accountability
• Anti-atheist exclusion rises when trust matters critically in a role
• Anti-atheist hostility is not simply generalized prejudice
• Anti-atheist prejudice cannot be explained by xenophobia or general outgroup distrust.
• Anti-atheist prejudice falls out of supernatural-monitoring trust logic
• Anti-atheist prejudice is socially accepted while racial prejudice is not
• Anti-atheist prejudice is specifically about distrust, not general dislike.
• Anti-atheist prejudice stems from distrust while anti-gay prejudice stems from disgust.
• Anti-atheist prejudice stems from trust concerns, not xenophobia or outgroup dislike
• Anti-atheist prejudice tracks wherever religious majorities dominate
• Antipathy toward atheists stems from religious distrust, not general dislike
• Any genuine religious belief signals trustworthiness, not just one’s own church.
• Armenian silk merchants sustained three centuries of cross-imperial trade via church-linked monitoring
• Armenian silk traders sustained 300 years of commerce without a state
• As groups grow, moral enforcement and religion become intertwined.
• As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities
• Atheism can become a stable cultural equilibrium comparable to universal literacy
• Atheism can become culturally stable despite religion’s cognitive head start.
• Atheism can become stable once multiple enabling conditions align
• Atheism has multiple independent causal pathways, not one
• Atheism is more disqualifying for US voters than race, gender, or sexuality
• Atheism is perceived as a public threat to cooperation, not a private belief
• Atheism lacks the intuitive support that religious belief enjoys.
• Atheist counts are distorted by social-desirability pressures in both directions
• Atheist distrust stems specifically from moral distrust, not fear or disgust
• Atheists and gays share exclusion but provoke psychologically distinct prejudice
• Atheists are distrusted as norm-wildcards whose beliefs cannot be inferred
• Atheists are distrusted more than other stigmatized groups even amid rising tolerance
• Atheists are intuitively distrusted as much as convicted criminals.
• Atheists are intuitively distrusted as much as convicted rapists
• Atheists are intuitively distrusted as severely as rapists in experiments.
• Atheists are specifically distrusted as moral freeloaders, not disliked generally
• Atheists but not agnostics may define identity against religious believers
• Atheists generally do not distrust religious believers
• Atheists lack the cohesive community that belief-based groups share
• Atheists remain the only American group that cannot win majority approval
• Atheists remain the only US group most voters refuse to support
• Atheists remain the only US minority group that lacks majority social acceptance
• Atheists were historically deemed untrustworthy because oaths cannot bind them
• Atheists’ unresponsiveness to God primes rules out ideomotor explanations
• Audible religious calls trigger generosity in non-Western settings
• Autism-linked mentalizing deficits reduce belief in a personal God
• Autistic believers describe God without personal relationship or emotional dependency.
• Autistic deficits in mentalizing predict higher rates of religious disbelief.
• Autistic religiosity lacks an interpersonal relationship with a communicating God
• Being an openly atheist American politician is electoral poison
• Being watched by God intensifies awareness of social surveillance on Sundays
• Being watched cues reliably boost prosocial behavior and suppress cheating
• Belief acquisition depends on who is believed more than what is believed.
• Belief and disbelief arise through the same four cognitive pathways.
• Belief content may not cause intergroup violence; solidarity may instead.
• Belief in a deity and committed worship of that deity are psychologically distinct
• Belief in a god is separable from commitment to it, except in monotheism.
• Belief in a personal watchful God predicts condemnation of moral transgressions
• Belief in a punishing afterlife predicts lower crime rates than belief in heaven does.
• Belief in a supernatural monitor lowers the cost of trusting strangers in trade networks
• Belief in a watching God affects behavior only when consciously activated.
• Belief in any idea requires adult testimony and credible displays of devotion
• Belief in any moralizing deity signals trustworthiness to strangers
• Belief in divine moral punishment enabled the Zhou kingdom’s expansion
• Belief in God’s existence, not lifestyle, drives outgroup distrust.
• Belief in gods depends on an intuitive mind-body dualism
• Belief in gods emerges from ordinary cognition, not dedicated brain machinery
• Belief in hell predicts economic productivity independent of general religiosity
• Belief in supernatural watchers depends on both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission
• Belief in supernatural watchers enables stranger-to-stranger cooperation
• Belief in watchful gods and ritual belonging function as one integrated system
• Belief that God punishes reduces people’s willingness to punish wrongdoers themselves.
• Belief-as-accident and belief-as-glue are rival traditions that need integration.
• Belief-centered religions generate more prejudice against atheists than practice-centered ones
• Belief-commitment differs fundamentally from mere mental representation of gods
• Belief-commitment, not mental representation alone, distinguishes worshipped gods
• Beliefs change behavior only when they enter conscious awareness
• Believers are broadly trusted more than disbelievers in religious-majority societies
• Believers distrust atheists because they doubt atheists feel watched by God.
• Believers extend more trust to people showing God commitment
• Believers hold fluctuating and conflicting beliefs about divine punishment
• Believers hold fluctuating, conflicting views of God’s temperament
• Believers implicitly represent even an omniscient God as having humanlike mental limits
• Believers read explicit atheism as a public signal of untrustworthiness
• Believers’ antagonism tracks perceived threat to group cooperation
• Believing a supernatural agent watches reduces cheating in children and adults
• Believing God is punishing deters cheating more than believing God is kind
• Believing God punishes reduces humans’ own costly punishment of norm violators
• Believing in God is inseparable from anthropomorphizing God as a personlike mind
• Believing in the wrong god is more acceptable than believing in none.
• Benevolent God concepts fail to suppress antisocial behavior, unlike punishing gods.
• Big God belief enabled group cooperation that agriculture alone could not achieve.
• Big God belief plus costly displays boosted Islamic trade success in Africa
• Big God believers are more generous than local-god believers cross-culturally
• Big God omniscience is not automatically and constantly effective on behavior
• Big God participation raises economic game offers by 6 to 10 percentile points
• Big God prosocial religions contributed to, not merely resulted from, large-scale societies
• Big God religion and large-scale cooperation co-evolved in feedback
• Big God religions create social boundaries excluding outsiders through supernatural monitoring.
• Big Gods and large-scale cooperation mutually reinforced each other’s expansion
• Big Gods are absent among hunter-gatherer societies like the Hadza
• Big Gods historically bound anonymous strangers together where courts and police were absent
• Big Gods prevalence should increase with group size
• Big Gods proliferated only where kin monitoring and reputation were insufficient
• Big Gods substituted for courts and police in binding strangers into cooperation
• Big Gods were necessary but not sufficient for group expansion.
• Buddhism as lived practice is full of supernatural agents despite nontheistic theology
• Buddhism as popularly practiced is richly supernatural despite its nontheistic dogma
• Buddhism is lived as a supernatural religion despite nontheistic theology
• By 2050 only one in five Christians will be of European descent
• Challenge to faith via theodicy is a luxury most believers cannot afford
• Chiefdom deities are intermediate between forager spirits and full Big Gods
• Children adopt beliefs backed by adults’ credible displays of devotion.
• China’s alleged lack of moralizing gods challenges the Big God thesis
• China’s atheism boom was mostly a statistical reclassification of folk religionists
• Chinese civilization may have scaled up through secular alternatives to religion
• Chinese kingship legitimation tied rule to divine moral surveillance
• Christian scripture also threatens an unforgiving wrathful God
• Christian scripture presents a merciful and peace-loving divine ideal
• Christianity’s demographic center is shifting to Africa and Asia
• Christians give 300 percent more to charity on Sundays than other days.
• Chronic, communal, in-group religious practice drives the prosociality effect
• Church attendance is not what triggers the felt divine gaze
• Church membership historically functioned as a reliability signal in business
• Cognitive content alone cannot explain which supernatural agents become gods
• Cognitive disfluency reduces religious belief across all conviction levels
• Cognitive scientists hold that theism is intuitive and atheism unnatural
• Commitment to a god and belief in that god are separable mental states.
• Commitment to one god does not require denying other gods’ existence
• Communes’ costly member requirements predict group survival patterns
• Compassion drives prosocial behavior in nonbelievers but not believers
• Conjunction fallacy tasks can indirectly measure implicit group stereotyping
• Consilience across disciplines is needed to explain religion’s origins
• Contact with diverse pilgrims drives the hajj’s tolerance effect.
• Cost commitment, not religion per se, drives group survival advantage
• Costly behaviors transmit beliefs because they prove honest commitment
• Costly belief in supernatural watchers evolved to prevent worse social-detection errors
• Costly commitments only build solidarity when backed by supernatural monitoring
• Costly Islamic displays enabled trade and credit trust in Africa
• Costly male rites spread via cultural group selection when they improve fighting success
• Costly public deeds signal genuine belief that words can fake
• Costly public displays reliably signal otherwise unfakeable genuine belief
• Costly religious displays evolved as honest signals of group commitment.
• Costly religious displays signal hard-to-fake commitment to group beliefs, like romantic love signals fidelity.
• Costly religious requirements directly explain group longevity in communes
• Costly religious requirements statistically explain why religious communes outlasted secular ones fourfold
• Costly religious signals induce cooperation without spreading belief
• Costly requirements predict religious group longevity independent of other factors
• Costly requirements, not religion per se, drove religious communes’ survival advantage
• Costly rites mobilize male solidarity and spread culturally through intergroup competition.
• Costly signaling cannot explain why nonbelievers find religious displays costly
• Costly signaling predicts universal religious displays while CRED allows cultural variability
• Costly signals predict universal religious behaviors while CREDs only predict some
• CRED-backed belief spreads via transmission advantage and outcompetes rival groups
• Credible displays need not be costly to persuade observers
• Credible displays of religious devotion trigger belief cascades and group-level competitive advantage
• Credible religious displays need not be costly to signal conviction
• Cross-cultural data show moralizing gods correlate with chronic water scarcity
• Cross-national correlations cannot establish causal direction for atheist distrust
• Cultural equilibria can lock in maladaptive paranoia and mutual suspicion
• Cultural evolution can lock groups into maladaptive equilibria, not just prosocial ones
• Cultural evolution can spread maladaptive behaviors that destroy social cooperation
• Cultural evolution favors religious groups that maximize reproduction
• Cultural evolution fills in god content within evolved mentalizing constraints
• Cultural learning biases explain passionate commitment to some gods but not others
• Cultural learning skills drove rapid human adaptation across all habitats
• Cultural learning, not cognitive features, determines which gods people commit to
• Cultural selection and genetic adaptation theories of supernatural punishment differ fundamentally
• Cultural selection shaped psychology to read supernatural-belief cues for trustworthiness
• Cultural survival must not be equated with moral superiority
• Culturally successful practices are not morally superior ones.
• Daily communal prayer predicts greater cooperation in public goods games
• Darwin himself held that tribal solidarity wins out as natural selection.
• Death awareness temporarily increases belief in even alien gods
• Death reminders inflame xenophobia unless compassionate religious values are primed
• Deliberative System 2 thinking introduces doubt and can override religious intuitions
• Demographic success of prosocial religions explains their global prevalence today
• Denmark maintained high social trust while rapidly losing religious belief
• Desert origins shaped the God of Abraham’s success
• Direct earthquake exposure increased religious devotion amid general secularization
• Directly experiencing disaster increases religious faith despite secularization trends
• Disbelief arises through four distinct psychological and cultural paths
• Disbelief does not always require effortful rejection of intuitive theism.
• Disbelief requires deliberate effort against natural cognitive dispositions.
• Discriminatory laws against atheists span many religious-majority countries
• Distinct pathways to atheism reinforce one another in real populations
• Distrust of atheists by believers is one-directional and deeply asymmetrical
• Distrust of atheists depends on perceiving them as rare, not merely immoral.
• Distrust of atheists exceeds distrust of Muslims despite atheists posing no external threat
• Distrust of atheists exceeds what warmth and competence stereotypes alone predict
• Distrust of atheists is a distinct, poorly understood religious prejudice
• Distrust of atheists is rooted in religious prosociality and narrowly context-specific
• Distrust of atheists persists even among mildly religious secularized Canadians
• Distrust of atheists stems from watching-God beliefs, not ingroup defense.
• Divine and secular authority are inseparable in explaining belief
• Divine witnesses to oaths were the core of Greco-Roman marketplace commerce
• Dogmatism and exclusivism travel with religion but are not religion
• Dramatic demographic expansion is what makes a religion a world religion
• Durkheim’s tradition treated god-belief as tangential to religion’s social function
• Early Chinese civilization may have relied on supernatural monitoring despite the stereotype
• Early Chinese Shang religion had a supreme watching deity over ancestor worship
• Early farming worsened health yet sustained larger populations than foraging did.
• Early hunter-gatherer gods cared about ritual, not moral behavior.
• Economic inequality raises religiosity for rich and poor alike
• Effective secular institutions drive religious decline by taking over its function.
• Effective secular monitoring can erode the root cause of atheist distrust.
• Egypt’s watchful sky deities arose where early agriculture demanded intense cooperation.
• Elaborate rituals and monuments co-emerge with larger complex societies
• Elevated gods better serve as overseers because height enables unobstructed watching
• Emotional charge makes stories spread regardless of factual accuracy
• Emotional content propagates ideas more than factual accuracy does
• Emotional labels change consumer behavior where scientific names do not
• Emotional wording of risk changes consumer behavior that factual wording does not
• Emotionally charged religious content gets remembered and retold more
• Emotionally charged stories spread farther than factually accurate ones
• Enlightenment founders excluded atheists from the tolerance they championed
• Even a casually mentioned dead student’s ghost deters cheating among university students
• Even believers affirming divine omniscience intuitively treat God as limited
• Even schematic three-dot faces trigger prosocial behavior
• Even scientists fall back into purpose-driven thinking under time pressure
• Even subliminal eye images triple honest payment on an honor system.
• Even three dots suggesting eyes reduce selfish behavior in economic games.
• Every religious bundle contains both conflict-generating and conflict-soothing elements
• Everyone is an intuitive theist even when self-reflectively atheist.
• Existential anxiety increases religious conviction while appeased anxiety weakens it
• Existential security and welfare states mutually reinforce religious decline in Scandinavia.
• Existential security, government stability, and subdued public religiosity mutually reinforce widespread disbelief
• Existential worries intensify religious belief and their appeasement diminishes it
• Experimental cheating paradigms create measurable opportunities to cheat for reward
• Experimental cheating studies rely on honor systems and rigged computers to create temptation
• Explaining how minds create social worlds is prerequisite to solving large-scale human catastrophe
• Exposure to intergroup conflict determines a population’s mix of self-interest and self-sacrifice.
• Exposure to natural disasters increases religiosity even controlling for income and education
• Extending moral concern to anonymous strangers was originally a religious achievement.
• Extravagant religious displays function as hard-to-fake signals of commitment
• Extreme public self-costing rituals attract devoted mass followings
• Eye detection is an ancient, automatic evolutionary adaptation for reputation monitoring
• Eyes are psychologically privileged over faces in attention
• Fake believers would invade and destroy prosocial religious groups without safeguards
• Fear of divine punishment sustains voluntary labor in coconut courier networks
• Fear of god functioned historically as the sole trust mechanism among strangers
• Fear of watchful gods measurably increased within-group cooperation and trust
• Feeling closer to ingroup members increases dehumanization of outgroups
• Fictive kinship terminology activates altruistic norms toward co-religionists
• Folk theism is System 1 intuition while deliberate atheism is System 2
• Forager deities are weak, ignorant, and indifferent to human morality
• Forager religion lacks moral teaching, clergy, and afterlife beliefs
• Foraging peoples’ deities lack power, knowledge, and moral concern
• Foraging societies’ gods rarely enforce moral rules that humans themselves uphold
• Fragile cultural achievements need many conditions at once to survive
• Freeloading hypocrites must be screened out or prosocial religious groups collapse
• Frequent prayer reduces scapegoating once dogmatic exclusivity is controlled
• Genetic relatedness predicts how much humans help one another.
• Global religiosity remains stable despite European secularization
• Global trust in religion far exceeds trust in government
• Göbekli Tepe is an 11,500-year-old temple predating agriculture
• God concepts must first pass a cognitive hurdle before they can acquire anxiety-soothing functions
• God concepts recruit existing social-monitoring circuits rather than special brain hardware
• God functions as an attachment figure who soothes and threatens simultaneously
• God priming increases both generosity and felt watching only in believers
• God-fearing reputations are trusted even by outsiders and nonbelievers
• God-priming shifted the dominant norm from selfishness to equal splitting.
• Gods and governments may be interchangeable enforcers of cooperation
• Gods and governments occupy the same functional niche in human psychology
• Gods become fiction when their cultural support base drains.
• Gods functioned as witnesses enforcing commercial oaths in ancient markets
• Gods grow more moral as anonymity spreads, not by genetic design
• Gods who see everything derive from humans who watch each other
• Gods’ moral involvement grows with group size culturally
• Group cultural dominance depends on conversions and fertility, not just longevity
• Group scaling required added hierarchy levels, with lower units cooperating to compete
• Group size is bounded by brainpower unless cultural solutions lift the limit
• Group size predicts Big Gods independent of stratification and missionary contact
• Group-level selection favors tribes whose members sacrifice for the common good
• Groups imposing costlier requirements attract more committed members
• Habitual analytic thinking produces and deepens religious doubt
• Hajj participation increases tolerance toward Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
• Hajj participation increases tolerance toward out-group members via cross-group contact
• Hard-to-fake devotion rituals screened out religious freeloaders
• Hard-to-fake religious displays enabled trust and credit among converts
• Heaven in early China was an omniscient moralizing god from the Shang onward
• Heaven-ordained moral codes legitimized dynasties and drove Zhou political expansion
• High fertility plus conversion, not doctrine, make world religions
• Highly cooperative societies can sustain mutual trust without religion.
• Hindu Thaipusam devotees earn both divine credit and social prestige proportional to self-inflicted pain.
• Historic Christian doctrine held atheists incapable of honoring social bonds
• Historical territorial conflict predicts strict cultural norm-enforcement centuries later
• Human brains develop differently across cultural contexts, unlike chemical laws.
• Human cooperation scales with genetic relatedness under Hamilton’s rule
• Human machines and organizations function as biological adaptations like teeth
• Human minds carry epistemic-vigilance biases against being duped
• Human planetary colonization rests on culturally learned adaptations, not just genetics.
• Human ultrasociality began with Natufian villages scaling up 12,000 years ago
• Hunter-gatherer gods are weak, morally indifferent, and self-interested
• Hunter-gatherer gods lacked wide moral concern and omniscience
• Hunter-gatherer groups lack the Big Gods of modern religions
• Hunter-gatherer religion exists entirely without moralizing deities or organized worship.
• Hunter-gatherers moved multi-ton stones before any sedentary technology existed
• Ideas survive by generating useful inferences, not by being true
• Ideas that compel action are more contagious than true ones
• Ideas that violate folk intuitions spread only with heavy institutional support
• Ideomotor accounts predict kind Gods matter while watcher accounts predict punishing ones
• Ignoring sacred values in negotiation actively worsens conflicts
• Illusory anonymity shifts moral norms, not merely behavior amounts
• Impaired mentalizing, not social isolation, explains atheism among autistics
• Implicit theism arises from rapid automatic intuitions rather than reasoned belief
• In folklore, becoming an animal is universally understood as a punishment
• In some non-Western societies cooperators rather than freeriders get punished
• In-group believers show the strongest mutual trust in economic games
• Individual variation in cognitive intuitions predicts supernatural belief strength
• Inducing a merely analytic thinking style lowers stated belief in God.
• Ingroup-threat explanations fail to explain atheist distrust deeper than Muslims’ or gay men’s
• Intergroup competition shifts populations toward self-sacrificial cooperation
• Intergroup competition triggers male generosity but leaves female giving unchanged
• Intergroup cooperation unravels because free-riding and competition outcompete collective benefit.
• Intergroup warfare, not internal conflict or mating competition, drives costly male rites.
• Intuitive representativeness heuristics systematically override logical probability reasoning
• Intuitive thinkers should be more religious and analytic thinkers more doubtful
• Involuntary bodily expressions function as hard-to-fake religious commitment signals
• Islamic belief self-enforced contracts, cutting transaction costs across the Sahara
• Islamic conversion in Africa spread via the economic trust its institutions enabled.
• Jurisdictional hierarchy serves as a proxy for society size
• Kin selection and reciprocity fail even in groups of 300 people
• Kin selection explains cooperation only among genetically related relatives
• Kin selection fails to stabilize cooperation even at village scale
• Kinship and reciprocity alone cannot explain large-scale human cooperation
• Laboratory trust games measure willingness to risk money on a stranger’s reciprocity
• Large anonymous communities emerged as a very recent blip in human evolutionary history.
• Large anonymous groups cannot sustain collective action without some enforcing mechanism
• Large anonymous groups need supernatural monitoring to avoid splintering
• Large atheist welfare states can replicate religion’s pro-social effects without gods
• Larger social groups require proportionally more brain tissue to manage
• Lay believers perceive God as a personlike mind, not an abstract force
• Least religious societies top rule-of-law and trust rankings
• Levirate polyandry preserved clans against male infertility
• Life stability and security make religious belief fade through indifference
• Limited-omniscience deities deter cheating only within their perceived range
• Long-distance trade required religious solidarity and watchful gods to sustain trust
• Lower average mentalizing in men explains part of the gender gap in religiosity
• Lower mentalizing ability erodes belief in a personal God.
• Major religions both produce and combat prejudice simultaneously
• Major religions both reduce and increase prejudice depending on how they are practiced.
• Majority and elite endorsement boosts a religious belief’s cultural spread.
• Market integration and Big God religion independently predict prosocial generosity cross-culturally
• Material incentives backfire on sacred values while symbolic recognition softens opposition.
• Material incentives harden sacred-value conflicts while symbolic gestures soften them
• Medieval ordeals worked by exploiting defendants’ genuine fear of divine punishment
• Memorability alone cannot explain which supernatural agents get worshipped
• Memorability of god concepts alone cannot explain which gods get worshipped
• Mental faculties enable gods to act as supernatural monitors of behavior
• Mental frontiers between faiths proved harder to cross than physical ones.
• Mentalizing capacities are cognitive foundations for belief in God
• Mentalizing deficits are only one contributing factor to religious disbelief.
• Mentalizing enables believers to interact with and be policed by gods
• Mere perceived surveillance, without reward or punishment, motivates prosocial behavior
• Mere perceived visibility changes prosocial norms even without actual observation
• Merely depicting eyes increases generosity by 55 percent
• Mildly counterintuitive concepts are remembered and transmitted best
• Mildly counterintuitive content boosts cultural transmission of ideas
• Mind-body dualism is an intuitive building block of all religious thinking.
• Mind-body dualism naturally prepares minds to accept the immortal soul
• Mind-reading capacities are prerequisites for believers to interact with and be policed by gods
• Mind-reading capacity supplies the cognitive basis for belief in disembodied gods
• Minimal eye-like dot patterns activate face recognition and curb selfishness
• Misunderstanding sacred values caused Western policy failures on extremism
• Modern hunter-gatherer evidence carries systematic biases that distort ancestral inference.
• Modern hunter-gatherers are imperfect windows onto ancestral human life
• Modern secular ideologies are secularized extensions of Christian universalism.
• Modern states repurposed the all-seeing eye motif rather than abandoning it
• Modernization theory falsely assumed religion would wither away.
• Mohist moralizers deployed belief in watchful punishing ghosts
• Mohist philosophers blamed social chaos on lost belief in supernatural punishment
• Monotheism inadvertently created the cognitive conditions for atheism and science.
• Monotheism inadvertently planted the seeds of science and atheism
• Monotheism’s disenchantment of nature enabled scientific exploration and atheism
• Moral beliefs influence action only when momentarily cognitively salient, not merely held.
• Moral distrust of atheists is not explained by generic stereotype content
• Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies
• Moral intuitions bind strangers into sacred communities that outcompete rivals
• Moral judgments serve group cohesion, not abstract individual reasoning
• Moral systems are interlocking mechanisms that regulate self-interest to enable cooperation
• Moralizing gods and costly rituals coevolved to boost in-group cooperation and out-compete rivals.
• Moralizing gods are a minority across documented world cultures
• Moralizing gods were rare in ancestral foraging religions
• Moralizing religion emerged recently as a rare cultural innovation
• Moralizing supernatural agents help sustain cooperation at scales beyond natural limits
• Morally concerned deities appear as societies scale up
• More religious societies have higher fertility than equally wealthy secular ones.
• Mortality reminders amplify intolerance unless paired with compassionate in-group teachings
• Most religions fail and vanish; only a few survive.
• Motivational reasoning biases perception without requiring conscious wishful thinking
• National belief in hell correlates with lower crime more than belief in God itself.
• Neither kin selection nor reciprocal altruism can explain human ultra-sociality toward strangers
• Neither kin selection nor reciprocal altruism can explain large-scale human cooperation.
• New atheist critiques of religion selectively excused US imperial violence
• No non-religious population has sustained above-replacement fertility for a century
• Nonbelievers show mild trust toward believers while believers trust only their own
• Nonconscious religious primes reliably affect believers but only inconsistently affect atheists.
• Observable religious commitment signals produce trust among believers
• Omniscient God thoughts are situationally activated, not chronically present
• Omniscient watchful gods enabled cooperation among anonymous strangers
• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind.
• Only humans achieved ultra-sociality within the last 12,000 years
• Only prosocial religions function as moral systems across history
• Open atheism has been nearly disqualifying for US political office.
• Open-textured relevant mysteries outcompete fully explained concepts culturally
• Ordeals emerged where evidence-gathering mechanisms were unavailable to judges
• Ordeals worked only because defendants believed in an omniscient moral watcher
• Ordinary cognition, not special modules, produces religious beliefs
• Organized religion may have preceded agriculture rather than followed it
• Organized violence creates member security that validates the movement’s fictitious world
• Outgroup prevalence reduces distrust-based prejudice even as it raises fear-based prejudice
• Outside WEIRD societies only religious ties extend cooperation beyond kin groups
• Overt self-reporting of prejudice is contaminated by social-desirability concerns
• Painful shared rituals can unite people across ethnic lines
• Pentecostalism now rivals established Christian denominations with 125 million followers
• People adopt religious beliefs backed by credible public displays
• People apply the same mental machinery to supernatural watchers as human watchers
• People cooperate more when they expect repeated dealings or know a partner’s reputation
• People embrace even the frightening parts of religion during existential threats
• People over-attribute behavior to character rather than situational pressures.
• People represent gods using the same mental machinery as human observers.
• People with autism have more difficulty perceiving minds and believing in gods
• Perceived accountability to supernatural monitors extends trust beyond one’s own religious community
• Perceived atheist prevalence directly reduces anti-atheist prejudice across nations and experiments
• Perceived external threat strengthens in-group solidarity and norm enforcement across cultures
• Perceived government instability increases belief in God as compensation
• Perceived lack of supernatural accountability marks atheists as specifically untrustworthy
• Perceived political instability increases belief in God and vice versa.
• Perceived surveillance reliably boosts prosocial behavior in daily life
• Perceived surveillance reliably reduces opportunism across everyday settings
• Perceptual processing difficulty itself triggers religious skepticism.
• Personal religiosity does not predict generosity in experiments.
• Personal religiosity is unrelated to generosity in economic games.
• Policing institutions substitute for kin-based altruism where populations are genetically diverse.
• Policing institutions substitute for kinship in genetically diverse populations
• Popular blame of religious belief for violence remains scientifically untested
• Post-Soviet religious resurgence tracked whether democracy or corruption replaced communism.
• Potent supernatural monitors must balance transcendence with human-like graspability
• Practice-heavy religious traditions dampen supernatural-monitoring concerns and atheist prejudice
• Prayer frequency and belief exclusivity are separable dimensions of religiosity
• Prayer frequency reduces scapegoating once religious exclusivity is held constant.
• Pre-agricultural peoples mobilized enormous resources for religious construction.
• Preagricultural social complexity waxed and waned rather than progressing linearly
• Prejudice splits into perceived warmth and competence dimensions
• Prejudice toward groups rises with their local prevalence when fear drives it.
• Primed concepts unconsciously increase matching behaviors such as walking slowly or interrupting
• Priming analytic thought reduces expressed belief in God
• Priming analytical thinking via a statue causes an immediate religious belief dip.
• Priming communal attendance raises approval of violence while priming prayer lowers it
• Priming God-thoughts makes believers more generous only toward fellow believers.
• Priming intuitive thinking temporarily raises belief in God.
• Priming police and judge boosts generosity as much as God words do.
• Priming reminders activate religious moral behavior; beliefs alone do not
• Proselytizing religions both created large-scale cooperation and spread globally
• Prosocial religions extend kinship language and psychology to co-religionists
• Prosocial religions helped groups scale up, especially in intense borderland conflict
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare
• Prosocial religions produce large-scale cooperation and then spread culturally
• Prosocial religions spread during the same Holocene period as large-group rise.
• Prosocial religions succeeded by bundling several psychological mechanisms into religious solidarity
• Prosocial religious groups outcompeted rivals through internal cooperation.
• Prosocial religious practices may have genetically altered their adopting groups
• Prosociality arises from many sources besides religious supernatural monitoring
• Prosperous religious groups deliberately surround members with constant reminders to sustain cooperation
• Psychology long neglected the scientific study of religion entirely
• Psychology textbooks ignored religion entirely even into the 1990s
• Public displays of costly commitment determine which gods gain believers
• Public displays of devotion sustain belief in a god while their absence erodes it
• Publicly costly acts of devotion serve to convert nonbelievers, not just reassure fellow believers
• Purely rational groups collapse more easily than ones bound by sacred values
• Pursuit of happiness is countered by the duty to worship God
• Randomness, loneliness, and bereavement each causally amplify religious belief
• Rational proofs of God fail because belief acceptance is not reasoned
• Reduced mentalizing capacity directly lowers belief in God
• Reducing sacred values to material ones worsens conflict
• Religion both causes anxiety and relieves it through punishment and comfort
• Religion both causes existential anxiety and soothes it
• Religion bundles opposing tendencies that both fuel and curb prejudice
• Religion bundles separable traits whose conflict roles must be disaggregated
• Religion can either reinforce or reduce prejudice depending on its function.
• Religion declines most steeply in strong welfare states
• Religion dominates communal conflict because it offers the broadest external support
• Religion drives conflict through monitoring, bonding, and sacralized values that block compromise.
• Religion drives conflict through three fluid pathways that also allow it to reduce conflict
• Religion drives intergroup conflict through three mutable pathways, not belief alone
• Religion evolved situational cues because chronic internal supernatural awareness is hard to sustain
• Religion factors into most wars but rarely causes them
• Religion is an evolved device enabling groups to function as adaptive units
• Religion is an evolving family-resemblance package, not a natural kind
• Religion is historically the primary motivator of prosociality among strangers.
• Religion must be decomposed into parts before asking which cause conflict
• Religion shapes behavior only when situational cues make it salient.
• Religion’s harms stem from corporate and dogmatic dominion, not religion itself
• Religion’s role in conflict varies by contextual conditions to identify
• Religion’s signature vices stem from institutional power and doctrinal rigidity, not belief itself
• Religions evolved to sprinkle situational reminders because internalized monitoring is hard to sustain
• Religions succeed by offering greater comfort against existential threats
• Religiosity declines as existential security and economic equality rise
• Religiosity has only a small, reliable correlation with racial prejudice
• Religiosity predicts helping only when one can be seen doing it
• Religious affiliation predicts above-replacement fertility independent of income and education
• Religious affiliation raises fertility even after controlling for education and income
• Religious agents’ minimal counterintuitiveness makes them memorably transmissible
• Religious altruism turns violent only under perceived group threat in asymmetric conflict
• Religious attendance predicts martyrdom support across six major religions worldwide
• Religious attendance, not private prayer, predicts support for suicide attacks
• Religious behavior depends on situational context, observable action, and intergroup competition
• Religious belief and social belonging form one integrated system.
• Religious belief cannot be understood apart from secular authority structures
• Religious belief correlates with higher fertility, shrinking secular populations
• Religious belief depends on mentalizing skills that imagine God’s mental states.
• Religious belief in divine sanctions lowers transaction costs in long-distance trade.
• Religious belief is a by-product of cognitive predispositions, not an evolved adaptation
• Religious belief only boosts prosociality where state institutions are weak
• Religious belief persists through multiple independent sustaining mechanisms
• Religious belief requires intuitive mentalizing about a personal God
• Religious belief rests on ordinary cognition that predates motivational influence.
• Religious belief self-enforces contracts better than secular institutions do
• Religious belief spreads culturally only when sincerity is publicly displayed, not merely claimed.
• Religious belief spreads through witnessed displays that can also reverse into doubt.
• Religious belief stems from both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission mechanisms.
• Religious belief strongly predicts distrust of atheists
• Religious belief withers when governments provide the cooperation religion once supplied.
• Religious believers infer atheists threaten cooperation in large groups
• Religious clergy functioned to police members’ identity and donations within trade networks.
• Religious commitment functions as a trust cue where institutions are weak
• Religious commitment signals are credible when they are hard to fake, not necessarily costly
• Religious commitment to rival gods still signals trustworthiness to believers and even nonbelievers
• Religious communes outlived secular ones but both mostly failed
• Religious competition, not innate piety, drives American religiosity
• Religious concepts persist through minimal counterintuitiveness that is memorable without rupturing meaning
• Religious congregation at sacred sites may have driven the adoption of farming
• Religious congregation may have drawn hunter-gatherers into settled agriculture
• Religious conservative sexual norms serve demographic group survival
• Religious conviction spikes during bereavement and reduces later grief
• Religious cues elicit prosociality only toward perceived co-religionists
• Religious cues harness situational power where secular institutions are absent
• Religious devotion’s link to scapegoating depends on disentangling companion traits
• Religious disbelief correlates with analytic thinking independent of education, intelligence, or demographics
• Religious disbelief is linked to a stable analytic cognitive style.
• Religious doctrines that boost fertility outcompete rival religious groups demographically.
• Religious extravagance functions as naturally selected honest signaling of group commitment
• Religious faith is sustained by multiple independent psychological flames
• Religious fertility advantages are culturally transmitted, not genetically fixed
• Religious fundamentalism will spread through demographic advantage rather than conversion
• Religious fundamentalists may outcompete secular liberalism through reproduction
• Religious group survival advantages stem from costly member requirements
• Religious groups expand through higher fertility rates, not just persuasion
• Religious groups offset secularization losses through higher birth rates
• Religious groups outsourced monitoring to gods and outcompeted rivals
• Religious homogeneity increases cooperative behavior among strangers
• Religious hypocrisy threatens to dissolve prosocial groups through free-riding impostors
• Religious identity alone does not make people more charitable
• Religious institutions shared merchant courier networks to police member identity
• Religious observance shifts the timing of sin rather than reducing its total
• Religious participation, not belief, drives support for intergroup conflict
• Religious participation, not belief, drives support for martyrdom
• Religious people exaggerate their attendance and charity in self-reports.
• Religious practices assembled by cultural evolution, not genetic adaptations
• Religious practices may have genetically altered human populations through gene-culture coevolution
• Religious practices may have shaped human genes, but proof is pending
• Religious primes fail to affect atheists, disproving a purely ideomotor account
• Religious priming boosts prosocial behavior only for believers, not non-believers.
• Religious priming effects are testable against the ideomotor alternative
• Religious priming produces generosity biased toward ingroup members
• Religious prosocial beliefs may have shaped human genetic evolution
• Religious prosocial effects are muted where secular institutions already generate trust.
• Religious reminders boost self-control but a controlling God reduces goal pursuit
• Religious ritual converts secular values into sacred ones that harden conflict
• Religious ritual makes otherwise secular values sacred and conflicts less tractable
• Religious rituals were assembled by cultural evolution, not genetic adaptation.
• Religious similarity serves as a trust cue that excludes atheists
• Religious situations boost prosociality more than personal devotion does
• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms
• Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers
• Religious survival advantage resists explanation by individual or genetic selection
• Religious thought defaults while disbelief requires deliberate cognitive effort
• Religious tolerance and violence change within a tradition across centuries
• Religious trust extends to any outgroup holding supernatural sanctioning beliefs
• Religious violence shifts historically within traditions, so no religion is inherently violent
• Religious worship frequency linearly predicts higher fertility across 82 countries
• Religious worship may have driven the agricultural revolution rather than resulting from it.
• Religious-belief effects are testable through temporary thought-priming experiments
• Religiously affiliated women outbreed the nonaffiliated in Switzerland
• Reminders of death temporarily spike belief in any available gods
• Reminders of effective secular authority specifically reduce distrust of atheists
• Reminders of God may curb selfishness and increase generosity toward strangers.
• Reminders of randomness and loneliness amplify belief in God
• Reputation and anticipated repeat interactions drive stranger cooperation from the first round.
• Researchers agree supernatural-punishment psychology drives religious cooperation
• Residual theistic intuitions persist even among explicit nonbelievers
• Resource conflict, large groups, and watchful gods co-occur across world societies.
• Ritual self-castration generated mass devotion that rivaled early Christianity
• Ritual synchrony alone generates trust and reduces freeriding among participants
• Rituals divide into high-frequency doctrinal and rare emotionally intense imagistic modes.
• Rituals tied to supernatural agents are judged more effective, boosting their potency
• Rule of law specifically dampens atheist distrust, not general trust
• Sacralization transforms mundane disputes into prolonged, nonnegotiable existential conflicts.
• Sacred values are inviolable in conviction yet flexible in application
• Sacred values are inviolable in conviction yet flexible in application due to interpretive ambiguity
• Sacred values resist material trade-offs and respond to symbolic meaning
• Sacred values resist trade-offs and override rational self-interest in decision making.
• Sacred values’ interpretive ambiguity allows peace-oriented reframing
• Schooling enables women to control fertility and pursue socioeconomic advancement
• Science and atheism are both counterintuitive and hard to learn.
• Science and atheism require many simultaneous conditions to flourish, unlike religion
• Science, literacy, and atheism each need multiple simultaneous conditions to survive
• Scientific knowledge about religion’s role in conflict is strikingly thin
• Secular authority primes increase stranger generosity as much as religious primes do.
• Secular cooperative societies emerged through institutions that displaced religion
• Secular government functions as a continuation of religious authority by other means
• Secular government institutions can prime prosocial generosity as effectively as religious ideas
• Secular governments and religious belief serve interchangeable functions, so strong states supplant gods.
• Secular ideologies carried out most twentieth-century genocides
• Secular ideologies have caused genocides comparable to religious ones
• Secular institutions and watchful gods are interchangeable in enforcing cooperation and trust
• Secular institutions can replace religion’s community-building and cooperation functions
• Secular institutions may reduce believers’ distrust of atheists by substituting for divine monitoring
• Secular institutions substitute for Big Gods by enforcing stranger cooperation
• Secular institutions substitute for supernatural monitoring by enabling trust in strangers.
• Secular institutions, atheist prevalence, and religiosity decline reinforce each other in a self-amplifying loop
• Secular moral authority primes generosity as much as God does.
• Secular rule of law independently reduces believers’ distrust of atheists
• Secular rule of law substitutes for religious monitoring of believers
• Secular societies can coexist with religion through state separation.
• Secular societies climbed the ladder of religion and then kicked it away
• Secular societies reached large-scale cooperation through religion then discarded it
• Secular society is the first major cultural rival to religiously organized cooperation
• Secular substitutes can replace Big Gods without undermining the pattern
• Secular-authority effects on prejudice may be group-specific, not general
• Secularization as linear progress is discredited but its universal validity remains open.
• Secularization predictions failed; most people across societies remain deeply religious.
• Self-castration sects attracted up to 100,000 followers across class lines
• Self-enforcing contracts in religious trade networks lower transaction costs.
• Self-interested rational-actor models cannot explain devotion-driven human behavior.
• Self-reported religiosity predicts prosociality only outside secular Western societies
• Self-reported religiosity reliably but weakly predicts racial prejudice
• Shared synchronous ritual synchronizes the heart rates of participants and their kin
• Signals of sincere belief identify trustworthy cooperation partners
• Situation beats stated religiosity in predicting selfishness
• Situational religious reminders, not personal religiosity, drive prosocial behavior
• Small groups cooperate easily but large groups fail without coordination
• Small transparent groups need no moralizing gods to sustain cooperation
• Small transparent groups sustain cooperation without moralizing supernatural agents
• Small-scale foraging societies lack omniscient moralizing gods, refuting gene-only accounts
• Social monitoring alone cannot sustain cooperation in large anonymous groups
• Social monitoring breaks down as group size grows, enabling religion’s rise.
• Social pressure biases atheism counts in opposite directions by society type
• Societal existential security and equality predict reduced religiosity
• Societies scale up through added hierarchy levels, not mere population growth
• Some cultures punish cooperators rather than freeriders in economic games
• Some deities possess spatially bounded omniscience limited to their own territory
• Strangers perceived as religious are trusted with more money
• Strict religious sects cyclically erode into laxness and spawn stricter splinters
• Strong community ties inherently enable exclusion and intergroup violence.
• Strong secular institutions can substitute for watchful gods in enforcing morality.
• Strong secular institutions raise trust and cooperation for believers and nonbelievers alike
• Strong secular institutions reduce believers’ need to distrust atheists
• Strong secular institutions substitute for and undermine belief in God
• Strong secular rule of law sustains trust and cooperation without religion
• Strong secular welfare institutions make religion socially unnecessary.
• Strong social ties also enable exclusion and violence toward outsiders
• Strong state institutions and existential security replace religion’s functions
• Strong welfare states with stable institutions erode religious belief
• Studying nonbelievers’ responses to religious primes requires nonconscious priming and independent belief measurement.
• Studying only surviving religions introduces survivor bias
• Sub-replacement fertility compounds geometrically toward population collapse.
• Subliminal God reminders increase costly punishment of free-riders among religious believers.
• Subliminal God words curb cheating regardless of personal religiosity.
• Subtle cues of being watched increase generosity by 55 percent.
• Subtle eye images alone curb cheating even with no real observer present
• Successful fairy tales contain two to three counterintuitive violations
• Suicide attacks correlate with and spread through visible self-sacrifice cycles
• Suicide attacks tripled between 2000 and 2003 and spread in waves of imitation.
• Suicide attacks tripled from 142 to 312 across the early 2000s in waves.
• Supernatural agency beliefs filter through evolved person-perception psychology
• Supernatural agents’ minimal counterintuitiveness explains their cultural advantage
• Supernatural belief works through the same surveillance mechanism that generates prosocial behavior
• Supernatural beliefs both motivate and signal prosocial intention across social contexts
• Supernatural beliefs require cultural commitment to become religion, not just cognitive content.
• Supernatural monitoring and compassion independently drive prosocial behavior.
• Supernatural monitoring and ideomotor theories make opposite predictions about divine temperament
• Supernatural monitoring beliefs drive atheist distrust even without ingroup membership
• Supernatural monitoring by any religion can extend trust beyond one’s own community
• Supernatural monitoring causally precedes ideomotor associations, not the reverse.
• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse
• Supernatural monitoring drove human groups to scale from small bands to vast societies
• Supernatural monitoring evolves to solve cooperation problems in large anonymous groups
• Supernatural monitoring needs neither monotheism nor creator status
• Supernatural monitoring substitutes cheaply for costly human enforcement in trust networks.
• Supernatural monitoring, not moral emotions alone, scaled prosociality to mass societies
• Supernatural policing may solve the infinite regress of punishing punishers
• Supernatural punishment belief is a naturally selected evolutionary adaptation
• Supernatural punishment explains religion’s prosocial effects better than ideomotor priming
• Supernatural punishment psychology is agreed upon despite evolutionary disputes
• Supernatural watcher beliefs check selfish behavior once social worlds grew transparent
• Supernatural watcher fear evolved because gossip made exposure costly
• Supernatural watcher fears emerged to police reputation in a gossiping species
• Supernatural watcher gods extend an intuitive human social-monitoring faculty.
• Surveillance alone cannot substitute for religion; only trusted secular authority does.
• Surveillance only substitutes for religious authority where the state itself is trusted
• Surveillance replaces religion only when the watcher is believed impartial.
• Surveillance states require trusted impartiality to substitute for religious Big Gods
• Survey self-reports are unreliable proxies for actual religious trust behavior
• Survival stress, not water scarcity per se, predicts moralizing deities
• Surviving supernatural beliefs mildly violate intuitive expectations rather than wildly or never doing so
• Survivor bias distorts the study of religious success
• Suspicion of strangers was the human default before large-scale societies
• Synchronous singing and movement increase trust and reduce freeriding among group members.
• Tacit supernatural beliefs arise naturally in children across all cultures.
• Teleological intuitions persist even in scientists and resist science education
• Temple Grandin conceives of God as universal entangled consciousness.
• The attendance-violence link generalizes across six major religions internationally
• The believer-disbeliever trust asymmetry is not ordinary ingroup-outgroup antagonism
• The Cognitive Reflection Task measures analytic over intuitive thinking
• The conjunction fallacy works only when a description matches perceived group stereotypes.
• The freeloader dilemma drives evolution of cues discriminating cooperators from cheats.
• The Hadza have cosmology without institutional religious structure
• The intuition of mind-body dualism underpins belief in disembodied supernatural agents
• The mere belief a supernatural agent is watching deters cheating even among children
• The mere feeling of being observed shifts behavior from selfish to reciprocal norms
• The most culturally resilient practices are not the most moral ones
• The most culturally successful supernatural beliefs mildly violate intuitive expectations.
• The null effects of religiosity on prosocial behavior reflect biased sampling of university students
• The Oneida Perfectionists lasted only 33 years before splintering.
• The question is which religious part causes conflict, not whether religion does
• The rational actor paradigm fails to explain intercultural conflict
• The religion-morality link emerged culturally and recently in history
• The religious-atheist trust gap is not symmetric ingroup-outgroup prejudice
• The religious-belief explanation for intergroup violence remains scientifically untested.
• The representativeness heuristic can be repurposed as a covert measure of implicit group stereotypes
• The same religious bundle contains both conflict and peace resources
• The trial by ordeal outperformed torture as a guilt-detection technique
• The United States stays religious because of inequality and weak safety nets
• The worldwide major religions began as obscure local cultural experiments
• Thinking about God activates the same brain regions as mind perception
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous
• Threatened personal control increases faith in God or government interchangeably
• Three independent labs converged that religious belief tracks intuitive thinking.
• Trade networks spread Islam across Africa and Southeast Asia more than armies did
• Traditional religions counteracted paranoia through collective structure
• Traditions that prioritize practice over belief show less prejudice against atheists
• Trust in impartial institutions substitutes for supernatural monitoring of strangers.
• Trust is a costly risky investment expecting future cooperation
• Unconscious God reminders deter cheating while personal religiosity does not
• Unconscious God-priming in word games raised Dictator Game giving.
• Unconscious primes trigger corresponding behaviors, as in elderly and rudeness studies
• Unconscious thoughts of God increase generosity in economic games
• Unconsciously primed concepts trigger corresponding behaviors in people
• Undermining anonymity reliably increases prosocial behavior across experiments
• Universal monotheism introduced individual free choice and collective humanity as new concepts
• Universities undermine religious belief by inculcating analytic thinking
• Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods
• Visibility campaigns reduce prejudice by making a concealable group’s size known
• Visible church membership historically signaled trustworthiness in anonymous American commerce.
• Warfare and resource competition drove the rise of large groups and Big Gods
• Warfare between groups predicts costly male rites, internal conflict and mating do not
• Watching gods correlated with large-scale agricultural cooperation in early civilizations
• Water scarcity contributed to the Khmer Empire’s collapse and favored desert moralizing gods
• Water-scarce societies tend to develop moralizing gods
• Western industrialized populations are psychological outliers at the extreme end of a human spectrum
• Western tolerance traditions historically exempted atheists from its protections
• Whether supernatural monitoring drove China’s unification remains historically disputed
• Willing martyrdom acts as the ultimate credibility-enhancing display
• Witnessing a ritual boosts generosity as much as participating does
• Witnessing an intense ritual boosts prosociality as much as participating in it
• Witnessing credible public commitment, not cognitive content, distinguishes gods from fictional characters
• Witnessing extravagant religious displays causes cultural contagion of belief
• Worldwide atheists would rank as the fourth largest religion
• Written records reveal religions evolving toward moralizing Big Gods with scale
• Young men show the strongest cooperate-to-compete instinct in intergroup conflict
• Zhou dynasty Heaven became a moralizing omniscient god granting rule via mandate