Minds of gods and human cognitive constraints: socio-ecological context shapes belief
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What believers say about gods’ thoughts, concerns, and dispositions reflects both the minds of believers and the societies in which they live. A review of the psychology of religion literature reveals a paradox: individuals benefit from belief in divine benevolence, while groups benefit from belief in divine punishment. We propose that a resolution to this paradox lies in the combination of cognitive systems and culturally-transmitted social norms. We suggest that, as access to reflective thinking capacity is depleted, unreflective thinking driven by culturally-transmitted decision rules that are themselves shaped by local environments (e.g., norms, schemas, and scripts) play a central role in shaping beliefs about the minds of gods. We first review the psychological literature and examine how cognition and social norms might combine to favor certain patterns of beliefs around what gods know, care about, and do. We use a cultural evolutionary lens to indicate ways that various beliefs about gods’ minds may confer adaptive benefits to individuals or groups across various socio-ecological contexts, focusing on three cultural strategies: honor, face, and dignity. Along the way, we draw from existing data to predict what shapes gods’ minds may take and suggest ways to test predictions drawn from this review.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".