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Notes -
I've seen quite a bit of suspicion about the idea that religion is pro-social (often substituted for the idea that religion instead is a memetic parasite that spreads by taking advantage of certain human biases without conferring an advantage upon those who adopt it), but I will say there is support for my hypothesis in the literature.
For example: "Converging lines of field and experimental evidence suggest that cultural evolution, building on certain innate cognitive foundations, has favored the emergence of beliefs in powerful moralizing deities concerned with the prosocial behavior of individuals beyond kin- and reciprocity-based networks (Norenzayan and Shariff 2008). Cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies has found that larger and more complex societies were much more likely to subscribe to potent deities directly concerned with morality and willing to punish norm violators (Roes and Raymond 2003; Johnson 2005). Studies conducted across a diverse range of societies including foragers, farmers, and herders, show that professing a world religion predicts greater fairness toward ephemeral interactants (Henrich et al. 2010). Experiments with North Americans show that unconsciously activating religious concepts lead to reduced cheating and greater generosity toward strangers (Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Mazar and Ariely 2006; Shariff and Norenzayan 2007), except among ardent atheists. Together, these cross-cultural, historical, and experimental findings suggest that (1) religion—as a phenomenon with potentially deep roots (Klein 1989)—has not always been about high moralizing gods and (2) modern world religions may have evolved to create a potent linkage between the supernatural and the prosocial. Thus, we hypothesize that cultural evolutionary processes, driven by competition among groups, have exploited aspects of our evolved psychology, including certain cognitive by-products, to gradually assemble packages of supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals that were increasingly effective at instilling deep commitment, galvanizing internal solidarity, and sustaining larger-scale cooperation."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1162/BIOT_a_00018
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