Abstract
Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness. Specifically, we argue that (1) mental representations about the abstract vs. the supernatural are largely overlapping, if not identical, and (2) when the data-generating processes for scarce and ambiguous observations are complex and opaque, a naive observer can improve a bias-variance trade-off by starting with a simple, underspecified explanation that Western observers readily interpret as “supernatural.” We then argue that (3) in many cases, knowledge specialists across cultures offer pragmatic services that involve apparently supernatural explanations, and their clients are frequently willing to pay them in a market for useful and effective services. We propose that at least some ethnographic descriptions of religion might actually reflect ordinary and adaptive responses to novel problems such as illnesses and natural disasters, where knowledge specialists possess and apply the best available explanations about phenomena that would otherwise be completely mysterious and unpredictable.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Our distinction here is similar to the one made in Sperber (1997) between intuitive and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs, akin to mental models, are the representational output of cognition resulting from the mind’s architecture. Reflective beliefs, akin to explanations, are higher-order propositions, the sources and contents of which are evaluated using a lexicon of preexisting beliefs (which are often cultural). Our occasional use of the term explanatory models emphasizes the representational nature of explanations, but it is critical to keep in mind that these representations, while informed a great deal by internal cognitive models of the world, are ultimately communicated to others. In other words, they are public, rather than private, representations (see also Sperber, 1996).
The “ordered matter” in this context refers to its low entropy, in contrast to chaotic or randomly distributed matter.
Abductive inference was proposed and discussed by C. S. Peirce (e.g., 1958) as a type of inference that complements others, such as inductive and deductive modes of inference.
Strictly speaking, and to reiterate the distinction made at the outset of the section on Explanations, our use of the term “models” in this context refers to explanatory models, and should not be confused with mental models. We made this distinction above by suggesting that explanations are higher-level and socially communicated models, or public representations, compared to lower-level mental models, or private representations. Nevertheless, in some cases, explanatory models might strongly resemble the mental models that generated them. We revisit this possibility further below.
References
Albuquerque, U. P., De Medeiros, P. M., & Casas, A. (2015). Evolutionary ethnobiology. In U. P. Albuquerque, P. M. De Medeiros, & A. Casas (Eds.), Evolutionary ethnobiology (pp. 1–5). Springer.
Allen, C., & Neal, J. (2020). Teleological notions in biology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. (Spring 2020 edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/
Amini, M. (2003). Has foundationalism failed? A critical review of Coherence in Thought and Action by Paul Thagard. Human Nature Reviews, 3, 119–123. Accessible at https://web.archive.org/web/20040405045358/http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/thagard.html
Andersen, M. M., Kiverstein, J., Miller, M., and Roepstorff, A. (2022). Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play. Psychological Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000369
Anderson, P. W. (1972). More is different. Science, 177, 393–396.
Andrews, P. W. (2001). The psychology of social chess and the evolution of attribution mechanisms: Explaining the fundamental attribution error. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(1), 11–29.
Andritzky, W. (1989). Sociopsychotherapeutic functions of Ayahuasca healing in Amazonia. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 21(1), 77–89.
Atanasov, A. G., Zotchev, S. B., Dirsch, V. M., & Supuran, C. T. (2021). Natural products in drug discovery: Advances and opportunities. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 20(3), 200–216.
Atran, S. (1993). Cognitive foundations of natural history: Towards an anthropology of science. Cambridge University Press.
Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(4), 547–569.
Atran, S. (Ed.). (1999). Folkbiology. MIT Press.
Atran, S., & Medin, D. L. (2008). The native mind and the cultural construction of nature. MIT Press.
Atran, S., Medin, D., Ross, N., Lynch, E., Vapnarsky, V., Ek, E., Coley, J., Timura, C., & Baran, M. (2002). Folkecology, cultural epidemiology, and the spirit of the commons: A garden experiment in the Maya lowlands, 1991–2001. Current Anthropology, 43(3), 421–450.
Barbour, I. G. (1966). Issues in science and religion. Prentice-Hall.
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press.
Barlev, M., Mermelstein, S., & German, T. C. (2017). Core intuitions about persons coexist and interfere with acquired Christian beliefs about God. Cognitive Science, 41, 425–454.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Theory of mind and autism: A fifteen-year review. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience (pp. 3–20). Oxford University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., Jolliffe, T., Mortimore, C., & Robertson, M. (1997). Another advanced test of theory of mind: Evidence from very high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38(7), 813–822.
Barrett, J. L. (2000). Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 29–34.
Barrett, H. C. (2001). On the functional origins of essentialism. Mind & Society, 2(1), 1–30.
Barrett, H. C. (2015). The shape of thought: How mental adaptations evolve. Oxford University Press.
Barrett, J. L., & Keil, F. C. (1996). Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in god concepts. Cognitive Psychology, 31(3), 219–247.
Bar-Yam, Y. (2002). Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile. In Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), developed under the auspices of the United Nations (UNESCO). Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers. https://necsi.edu/complexity-rising-from-human-beings-to-human-civilization-a-complexity-profile
Battaglia, P. W., Hamrick, J. B., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2013). Simulation as an engine of physical scene understanding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(45), 18327–18332.
Beck, J., & Forstmeier, W. (2007). Superstition and belief as inevitable by-products of an adaptive learning strategy. Human Nature, 18(1), 35–46.
Bendixen, T., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., Henrich, J., McNamara, R. A., Norenzayan, A., Willard, A., Xygalatas, D., & Purzycki, B. G. (2021a). Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies. PsyArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tjn3e
Bendixen, T., Lightner, A., & Purzycki, B. G. (2021b). The cultural evolution of religion and cooperation. PsyArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fhscv
Bendixen, T., & Purzycki, B. G. (2020). Peering into the minds of gods: What cross-cultural variation in gods’ concerns can tell us about the evolution of religion. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 5(2), 142–165.
Berk, L. E. (1994). Why children talk to themselves. Scientific American, 271(5), 78–83.
Bird-David, N. (1999). “Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40(S1), S67–S91.
Birnbaum, D., Deeb, I., Segall, G., Ben-Eliyahu, A., & Diesendruck, G. (2010). The development of social essentialism: The case of Israeli children’s inferences about Jews and Arabs. Child Development, 81(3), 757–777.
Blackwell, A. D., & Purzycki, B. G. (2018). Shamanism and efficacious exceptionalism. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e69.
Blackwell, A. D. (2009). Life history trade-offs in growth and immune function: The behavioral and immunological ecology of the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador, an indigenous population in the midst of rapid economic and ecological change. PhD dissertation, University of Oregon.
Bloch, M. (2008). Why religion is nothing special but is central. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 2055–2061.
Blouw, P., Solodkin, E., Thagard, P., & Eliasmith, C. (2016). Concepts as semantic pointers: A framework and computational model. Cognitive Science, 40(5), 1128–1162.
Box, G. E. (1976). Science and statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71(356), 791–799.
Boyer, P. (1998). Cognitive tracks of cultural inheritance: How evolved intuitive ontology governs cultural transmission. American Anthropologist, 100(4), 876–889.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained. Random House.
Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 119–124.
Boyer, P. (2020a). Informal religious activity outside hegemonic religions: Wild traditions and their relevance to evolutionary models. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 10(4), 459–472.
Boyer, P. (2020b). Why divination? Evolved psychology and strategic interaction in the production of truth. Current Anthropology, 61(1), 100–123.
Boyer, P. (2021). Deriving features of religions in the wild. Human Nature, 32(3), 557–581.
Boyer, P., & Ramble, C. (2001). Cognitive templates for religious concepts: Cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations. Cognitive Science, 25(4), 535–564.
Brighton, H., & Gigerenzer, G. (2012). Homo heuristicus and the bias–variance dilemma. In J. Schulkin (Ed.), Action, perception and the brain (pp. 68–91). Springer.
Brighton, H., & Gigerenzer, G. (2015). The bias bias. Journal of Business Research, 68(8), 1772–1784.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. MIT Press.
Carey, S. (1992). The origin and evolution of everyday concepts. Cognitive Models of Science, 15, 89–128.
Carey, S. (2011). Précis of the origin of concepts. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(3), 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000919
Carruthers, P. (2016). Two systems for mindreading? Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7(1), 141–162.
Carruthers, P., Stich, S., & Siegal, M. (Eds.). (2002). The cognitive basis of science. Cambridge University Press.
Casler, K., & Kelemen, D. (2008). Developmental continuity in teleo-functional explanation: Reasoning about nature among Romanian Romani adults. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9(3), 340–362.
Chapin, N. M. (1983). Curing among the San Blas Kuna of Panama. PhD thesis, The University of Arizona.
Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125(1), 47–63.
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), 67–90.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: Toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science. Cognition, 50(1–3), 41–77.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
De Cruz, H., & De Smedt, J. (2015). A natural history of natural theology: The cognitive science of theology and philosophy of religion. MIT Press.
Dell’Orco, S. (2013). Intuition, decision and ecological rationality: The toolbox of evolution. Human Evolution, 28(1–2), 65–77.
Dellsén, F. (2017). Reactionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 61, 32–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.01.005
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea. Touchstone, Simon and Schuster.
Dennett, D. (2009). Intentional systems theory. In B. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann, & S. Walter (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind (pp. 339–350). Oxford University Press.
Draper, J. W. (2009). History of the conflict between religion and science. Cambridge University Press.
Edgerton, R. B. (2010). Sick societies. Simon and Schuster.
Ellen, R. F. (2006). The categorical impulse: Essays in the anthropology of classifying behaviour. Berghahn Books.
Emmons, R. A., & Paloutzian, R. F. (2003). The psychology of religion. Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1), 377–402.
Fitouchi, L., & Singh, M. (2022). Supernatural punishment beliefs as cognitively compelling tools of social control. Current Opinion in Psychology, 44, 252–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.09.022
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. Harvard University Press.
Fortis, P. (2013). Kuna art and shamanism: An ethnographic approach. University of Texas Press.
Foster, K. R., & Kokko, H. (2009). The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276(1654), 31–37.
Gardner, A. (2019). The agent concept is a scientific tool. Metascience, 28, 359–363. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-019-00451-9
Gelman, S. A. (2004). Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(9), 404–409.
Gelman, S. A., & Hirschfeld, L. A. (1999). How biological is essentialism? Folkbiology, 9, 403–446.
Gelman, S. A., et al. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford University Press.
Gentner, D., & Stevens, A. L. (Eds.). (2014). Mental models (2nd ed.). Psychology Press.
Gentner, D., & Gentner, D. R. (2014). Flowing waters or teeming crowds: Mental models of electricity. In D. Gentner & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (2nd ed., pp. 107–138). Psychology Press.
Gentner, D., & Toupin, C. (1986). Systematicity and surface similarity in the development of analogy. Cognitive Science, 10(3), 277–300.
Gerstenberg, T., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2017). Intuitive theories. In Oxford handbook of causal reasoning (pp. 515–548). Oxford University Press.
Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science, 336(6080), 493–496.
Gigerenzer, G. (2010). Rationality for mortals: How people cope with uncertainty. Oxford University Press.
Gigerenzer, G., & Brighton, H. (2009). Homo heuristicus: Why biased minds make better inferences. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(1), 107–143.
Gigerenzer, G., & Murray, D. J. (2015). Cognition as intuitive statistics. Psychology Press.
Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (2001). Simple heuristics that make us smart. Oxford University Press.
Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R., & Pachur, T. (2011). Heuristics. Oxford University Press.
Gillispie, C. C. (1996). Genesis and geology: A study in the relations of scientific thought, natural theology, and social opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1850. Harvard University Press.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2002). Environmental complexity and the evolution of cognition. In R. Sternberg & J. Kaufman (Eds.), The evolution of intelligence (pp. 233–249). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gopnik, A. (1998). Explanation as orgasm. Minds and Machines, 8(1), 101–118.
Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (1994). The theory theory. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 257–293). Cambridge University Press.
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (2000). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind (reprint edition). William Morrow.
Gottlieb, A. (2004). The afterlife is where we come from: The culture of infancy in West Africa. University of Chicago Press.
Griffiths, T. L., Sobel, D. M., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Gopnik, A. (2011). Bayes and blickets: Effects of knowledge on causal induction in children and adults. Cognitive Science, 35(8), 1407–1455.
Guthrie, S. E. (1995). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.
Guthrie, S. E. (2014). Religion as anthropomorphism at Çatalhöyük. In I. Hodder (Ed.), Religion at work in a Neolithic society: Vital matters (pp. 86–108). Cambridge University Press.
Guthrie, S. E., Agassi, J., Andriolo, K. R., Buchdahl, D., Earhart, H. B., Greenberg, M., Jarvie, I., Saler, B., Saliba, J., Sharpe, K. J., et al. (1980). A cognitive theory of religion [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology, 21(2), 181–203.
Guthrie, S. E. (2016). Religion as anthropomorphism: A cognitive theory. In James R. Liddle, and Todd K. Shackelford (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology and religion (online edn). Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199397747.013.6
Hammerstein, P., & Hagen, E. H. (2006). Evolutionary genetics: Broken cogs or strategic agents? Science, 312(5773), 530.
Harman, G. H. (1965). The inference to the best explanation. The Philosophical Review, 74(1), 88–95.
Haselton, M. G., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.1.81
Haselton, M. G., Bryant, G. A., Wilke, A., Frederick, D. A., Galperin, A., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Moore, T. (2009). Adaptive rationality: An evolutionary perspective on cognitive bias. Social Cognition, 27(5), 733–763.
Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1997). Qualitative changes in intuitive biology. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 12(2), 111–130.
Heintz, C. (2013). Scaffolding on core cognition. In L. R. Caporael, J. R. Griesemer, & W. C. Wimsatt (Eds.), Developing scaffolds in evolution, culture and cognition (pp. 209–228). MIT Press.
Hofstadter, D. R., & Sander, E. (2013). Surfaces and essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking. Basic Books.
Holovatch, Y., Kenna, R., & Thurner, S. (2017). Complex systems: Physics beyond physics. European Journal of Physics, 38(2), 023002.
Horton, R. (1967). African traditional thought and Western science. Africa, 37(2), 155–187.
Horton, R. (1997). Patterns of thought in Africa and the West: Essays on magic, religion and science. Cambridge University Press.
Howell, S. (2012). Knowledge, morality, and causality in a “luckless” society: The case of the Chewong in the Malaysian rain forest. Social Analysis, 56(1), 133–147.
Hume, D. (1739). A treatise of human nature. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4705
Hume, D. (1757). The natural history of religion. https://davidhume.org/texts/n/
Hunn, E. (1976). Toward a perceptual model of folk biological classification. American Ethnologist, 3(3), 508–524.
Ingold, T. (2000). From trust to domination: An alternative history of human-animal relations. In T. Ingold (Ed.), The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (pp. 61–76). Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2006). Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought. Ethnos, 71(1), 9–20.
Jackson, J. C., Wilbanks, D., Bastian, B., Watts, J., DiMaggio, N., & Gray, K. (2021). Supernatural explanations across the globe are more common for natural than social phenomena. PsyArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6us9r
Jaiswal, Y. S., & Williams, L. L. (2017). A glimpse of Ayurveda: The forgotten history and principles of Indian traditional medicine. Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 7(1), 50–53.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Harvard University Press.
Josephson, J. R., & Josephson, S. G. (1996). Abductive inference: Computation, philosophy, technology. Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar.
Kaiser, M. K., Proffitt, D. R., & McCloskey, M. (1985). The development of beliefs about falling objects. Perception & Psychophysics, 38(6), 533–539.
Keil, F. C. (1994). The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains: The origins of concepts of living things. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 234–254). Cambridge University Press.
Keil, F. C. (2006). Explanation and understanding. Annual Review of Psychology, 57(1), 227–254.
Keil, F. C., Levin, D. T., Richman, B. A., & Gutheil, G. (1999). Mechanism and explanation in the development of biological thought: The case of disease. In S. Atran (Ed.), Folkbiology (pp. 285–319). MIT Press.
Keil, F. C., Wilson, R. A., & Wilson, R. A. (2000). Explanation and Cognition. MIT Press.
Kelemen, D. (1999a). The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children. Cognition, 70(3), 241–272.
Kelemen, D. (1999b). Why are rocks pointy? Children’s preference for teleological explanations of the natural world. Developmental Psychology, 35(6), 1440–1452.
Kelemen, D. (2004). Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science, 15(5), 295–301.
Kelemen, D., & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition, 111(1), 138–143.
Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., & Seston, R. (2013). Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: Purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 142(4), 1074–1083.
Kinzler, K. D., & Spelke, E. S. (2007). Core systems in human cognition. Progress in Brain Research, 164, 257–264.
Kuhn, D. (1989). Children and adults as intuitive scientists. Psychological Review, 96(4), 674–689.
Kuptsov, P. V., Kuptsova, A. V., & Stankevich, N. V. (2021). Artificial neural network as a universal model of nonlinear dynamical systems. arXiv:2104.05402.
Kwapień, J., & Drożdż, S. (2012). Physical approach to complex systems. Physics Reports, 515(3–4), 115–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2012.01.007
Ladyman, J., Lambert, J., & Wiesner, K. (2013). What is a complex system? European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 3(1), 33–67.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1986). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lambiotte, R., Rosvall, M., & Scholtes, I. (2019). From networks to optimal higher-order models of complex systems. Nature Physics, 15(4), 313–320.
Lang, M., Purzycki, B. G., Apicella, C. L., Atkinson, Q. D., Bolyanatz, A., Cohen, E., Handley, C., Kundtová Klocová, E., Lesorogol, C., Mathew, S., McNamara, R. A., Moya, C., Placek, C. D., Soler, M., Vardy, T., Weigel, J. L., Willard, A. K., Xygalatas, D., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2019). Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286(1898), 20190202.
Laughlin, C. D. (2019). Supernatural and the invisible: A biogenetic structural account. In P. F. Craffert, J. R. Baker, & M. J. Winkelman (Eds.), The Supernatural after the Neuro-turn (pp. 29–47). Routledge.
Legare, C. H., Evans, E. M., Rosengren, K. S., & Harris, P. L. (2012). The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations across cultures and development. Child Development, 83(3), 779–793.
Leslie, A. M., Xu, F., Tremoulet, P. D., & Scholl, B. J. (1998). Indexing and the object concept: Developing “what” and “where” systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(1), 10–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(97)01113-3
Levin, I., McElroy, T., Gaeth, G., Hedgecock, W., & Denburg, N. (2014). Behavioral and neuroscience methods for studying neuroeconomic processes: What we can learn from framing effects. In V. F. Reyna & V. Zayas (Eds.), The neuroscience of risky decision making (pp. 43–69). American Psychological Association.
Lightner, A. D., & Purzycki, B. G. (2023). Game theoretical aspects of the minds of gods. In B. G. Purzycki & T. Bendixen (Eds.), The minds of gods: A cross-disciplinary survey. Bloomsbury.
Lightner, A. D., Heckelsmiller, C., & Hagen, E. (2021a). Ethnomedical specialists and their supernatural theories of disease. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00589-8
Lightner, A. D., Heckelsmiller, C., & Hagen, E. (2021b). Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 3, E37. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.31
Lindeman, M., & Svedholm, A. M. (2012). What’s in a term? Paranormal, superstitious, magical and supernatural beliefs by any other name would mean the same. Review of General Psychology, 16(3), 241–255.
Liu, Y.-Y., & Barabási, A.-L. (2016). Control principles of complex systems. Reviews of Modern Physics, 88(3), 035006.
Lombrozo, T. (2010). Causal–explanatory pluralism: How intentions, functions, and mechanisms influence causal ascriptions. Cognitive Psychology, 61(4), 303–332.
Lombrozo, T. (2016). Explanatory preferences shape learning and inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(10), 748–759.
Lombrozo, T., & Carey, S. (2006). Functional explanation and the function of explanation. Cognition, 99(2), 167–204.
Lu, Z., Hunt, B. R., & Ott, E. (2018). Attractor reconstruction by machine learning. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 28(6), 061104.
Luke, D. A., & Stamatakis, K. A. (2012). Systems science methods in public health: Dynamics, networks, and agents. Annual Review of Public Health, 33(1), 357–376.
Marshall, J. A., Trimmer, P. C., Houston, A. I., & McNamara, J. M. (2013). On evolutionary explanations of cognitive biases. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(8), 469–473.
Mayr, E. (1969). The biological meaning of species. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 1(3), 311–320.
McCauley, R. N. (2013). Why religion is natural and science is not. Oxford University Press.
McCauley, R. N., & Cohen, E. (2010). Cognitive science and the naturalness of religion. Philosophy Compass, 5(9), 779��792.
McClenon, J. (1997). Shamanic healing, human evolution, and the origin of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 36(3), 345–354.
McCloskey, M. (2014). Naive theories of motion. Psychology Press.
McCloskey, M., Caramazza, A., & Green, B. (1980). Curvilinear motion in the absence of external forces: Naive beliefs about the motion of objects. Science, 210(4474), 1139–1141.
McCloskey, M., Washburn, A., & Felch, L. (1983). Intuitive physics: The straight-down belief and its origin. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9(4), 636–649.
McDade, T. W., Reyes-Garcia, V., Blackinton, P., Tanner, S., Huanca, T., & Leonard, W. R. (2007). Ethnobotanical knowledge is associated with indices of child health in the Bolivian Amazon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(15), 6134–6139.
McElreath, R. (2018). Statistical rethinking: A Bayesian course with examples in R and Stan. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
McKay, R. T., & Dennett, D. C. (2009). The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(6), 493–510.
McKay, R., & Efferson, C. (2010). The subtleties of error management. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 309–319.
McKay, R., Ross, R. M., O’Lone, K., & Efferson, C. (2018). The error of god, revisited. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(3), 306–310.
McKenzie, D., & Kennedy, M. C. (2011). Scaling laws and complexity in fire regimes. In M. M. Caldwell, G. Heldmaier, R. B. Jackson, O. L. Lange, H. A. Mooney, E.-D. Schulze, U. Sommer, D. McKenzie, C. Miller, & D. A. Falk (Eds.), The landscape ecology of fire (pp. 27–49). Springer.
Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179–195). Cambridge University Press.
Medin, D. L., García, S. G., et al. (2017). Conceptualizing agency: Folkpsychological and folkcommunicative perspectives on plants. Cognition, 162, 103–123.
Mercier, H., & Boyer, P. (2021). Truth-making institutions: From divination, ordeals and oaths to judicial torture and rules of evidence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(3), 259–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.11.004
Mercier, H., & Heintz, C. (2014). Scientists’ argumentative reasoning. Topoi, 33(2), 513–524.
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57–74.
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2017). The enigma of reason. Harvard University Press.
Meyer, M., Gelman, S. A., Roberts, S. O., & Leslie, S.-J. (2017). My heart made me do it: Children’s essentialist beliefs about heart transplants. Cognitive Science, 41(6), 1694–1712.
Michotte, A. (1946). The perception of causality. Routledge.
Mitchell, M. (2006). Complex systems: Network thinking. Artificial Intelligence, 170(18), 1194–1212.
Moon, J. W., Cohen, A. B., Laurin, K., & MacKinnon, D. P. (2022). Is religion special? Perspectives on Psychological Science, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221100485
Morin, O. (2015). How traditions live and die. Oxford University Press.
Newberg, A. B., & Yaden, D. B. (2019). Neurocognitive processes and supernatural beliefs. In P. F. Craffert, J. R. Baker, & M. J. Winkelman (Eds.), The Supernatural after the Neuro-turn (pp. 69–89). Routledge.
Newman, E. A., Kennedy, M. C., Falk, D. A., & McKenzie, D. (2019). Scaling and complexity in landscape ecology. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 7, 293.
Nickerson, R. S. (2004). Cognition and chance: The psychology of probabilistic reasoning. Psychology Press.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. MIT Press.
Oaksford, M., & Chater, N. (2020). New paradigms in the psychology of reasoning. Annual Review of Psychology, 71, 305–330.
ojalehto, b. l., & Medin, D. L. (2015). Perspectives on culture and concepts. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 249–275.
ojalehto, b. l., Waxman, S. R., Medin, D. L., et al. (2013). Teleological reasoning about nature: intentional design or relational perspectives? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(4), 166–171.
ojalehto mays, b., Seligman, R., & Medin, D. L. (2020). Cognition beyond the human: Cognitive psychology and the new animism. Ethos, 48(1), 50–73.
Oppenheimer, D. M. (2004). Spontaneous discounting of availability in frequency judgment tasks. Psychological Science, 15(2), 100–105.
Palacios, A. G., & Bozinovic, F. (2003). An “enactive” approach to integrative and comparative biology: Thoughts on the table. Biological Research, 36(1), 101–105.
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B. C. (2018). Heuristics as Bayesian inference under extreme priors. Cognitive Psychology, 102, 127–144.
Peirce, C. S. (1958). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks, 1931–1958. Harvard University Press.
Perlman, M. (2004). The modern philosophical resurrection of teleology. The Monist, 87(1), 3–51.
Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28(1–2), 73–193.
Pitt, M. A., & Myung, I. J. (2002). When a good fit can be bad. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(10), 421–425.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526.
Price, M. H., & Jones, J. H. (2020). Fitness-maximizers employ pessimistic probability weighting for decisions under risk. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2, e28. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2020.28
Proffitt, D. R., & Kaiser, M. K. (2006). Intuitive physics. In L. Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of cognitive science. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/0470018860.s00556
Purzycki, B. G., & McNamara, R. A. (2016). An ecological theory of gods’ minds. In H. DeCruz (Ed.), Advances in religion, cognitive science, and experimental philosophy (pp. 143–167). Bloomsbury.
Qi, D., & Majda, A. J. (2020). Using machine learning to predict extreme events in complex systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(1), 52–59.
Quillien, T. (2018). Psychological essentialism from first principles. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(6), 692–699.
Quillien, T. (2020). When do we think that x caused y? Cognition, 205, 104410.
Reyes-Garcia, V., McDade, T., Vadez, V., Huanca, T., Leonard, W. R., Tanner, S., & Godoy, R. (2008). Non-market returns to traditional human capital: Nutritional status and traditional knowledge in a native Amazonian society. Journal of Development Studies, 44(2), 217–232.
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S.-J., & Tworek, C. M. (2012). Cultural transmission of social essentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(34), 13526–13531.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone. University of Chicago Press.
Rips, L. J. (2002). Circular reasoning. Cognitive Science, 26(6), 767–795.
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8(3), 382–439.
Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (2011). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. Pinter & Martin.
Salali, G. D., Chaudhary, N., Thompson, J., Grace, O. M., van der Burgt, X. M., Dyble, M., Page, A. E., Smith, D., Lewis, J., Mace, R., et al. (2016). Knowledge-sharing networks in hunter-gatherers and the evolution of cumulative culture. Current Biology, 26(18), 2516–2521.
Saler, B. (1977). Supernatural as a western category. Ethos, 5(1), 31–53.
Saler, B. (2021). The construction of the supernatural in Euro-American cultures: Something nice about vampires. Bloomsbury.
Sanborn, A. N., Mansinghka, V. K., & Griffiths, T. L. (2013). Reconciling intuitive physics and Newtonian mechanics for colliding objects. Psychological Review, 120(2), 411.
Saxe, R., Tenenbaum, J., & Carey, S. (2005). Secret agents: Inferences about hidden causes by 10- and 12-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 16(12), 995–1001.
Servais, V. (2018). Anthropomorphism in human–animal interactions: A pragmatist view. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2590.
Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 141(3), 423–428.
Siegal, M. (2002). The science of childhood. In P. Carruthers, S. Stich, & M. Siegal (Eds.), The cognitive basis of science (pp. 300–315). Cambridge University Press.
Siegenfeld, A. F., & Bar-Yam, Y. (2020). An introduction to complex systems science and its applications. Complexity, 2020, 1–16.
Singh, M. (2018). The cultural evolution of shamanism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, E66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17001893
Skinner, B. F. (1948). “Superstition” in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38(2), 168–172.
Smith, W. C. (1963). The meaning and end of religion. Fortress Press.
Snyder, L. J. (2012). The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world. Crown.
Sørensen, J. (2007). A cognitive theory of magic. Rowman Altamira.
Sosis, R. (2007). Magico-religious responses to threats of terror. Current Anthropology, 48(6), 903–911.
Sosis, R. (2019). The building blocks of religious systems: Approaching religion as a complex adaptive system. In G. Y. Georgiev, et al. (Eds.), Evolution, development and complexity (pp. 421–449). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00075-2_19
Spelke, E. S. (1990). Principles of object perception. Cognitive Science, 14(1), 29–56.
Spelke, E. S., & Kinzler, K. D. (2007). Core knowledge. Developmental Science, 10(1), 89–96.
Sperber, D. (1985). On anthropological knowledge. Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, D. (1994). The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 39–67). Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture. Blackwell.
Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83.
Sperber, D. (2018). Cutting culture at the joints? Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(4), 447–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2017.1323783
Strang, V. (2011). Representing water: Visual anthropology and divergent trajectories in human environmental relations. Anuário Antropológico, II, 213–242.
Stucky, K., & Gardner, A. (2022). The evolution of religiosity by kin selection. Religion, Brain & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2076727
Sulik, J., van Paridon, J., & Lupyan, G. (2021). Explanations in the wild. PsyArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/djaex
Szollosi, A., & Newell, B. R. (2020). People as intuitive scientists: Reconsidering statistical explanations of decision making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(12), 1008–1018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.09.005
Tang, Y., Kurths, J., Lin, W., Ott, E., & Kocarev, L. (2020). Introduction to focus issue: When machine learning meets complex systems: Networks, chaos, and nonlinear dynamics. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 30(6), 063151.
Tavernaa, A. S., Waxman, S. R., Medin, D. L., & Peralta, O. A. (2012). Core folkbiological concepts: New evidence from Wichi children and adults. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 12(34), 339–358.
Téglás, E., Vul, E., Girotto, V., Gonzalez, M., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Bonatti, L. L. (2011). Pure reasoning in 12-month-old infants as probabilistic inference. Science, 332(6033), 1054–1059.
Tenenbaum, J. B., Kemp, C., Griffiths, T. L., & Goodman, N. D. (2011). How to grow a mind: Statistics, structure, and abstraction. Science, 331(6022), 1279–1285.
Thagard, P. (2000). Coherence in thought and action. MIT Press.
Torres, L., Blevins, A. S., Bassett, D., & Eliassi-Rad, T. (2021). The why, how, and when of representations for complex systems. SIAM Review, 63(3), 435–485.
Tucker, B., Tombo, J., Hajasoa, P., Nagnisaha, C., et al. (2015). Ecological and cosmological coexistence thinking in a hypervariable environment: Causal models of economic success and failure among farmers, foragers, and fishermen of southwestern Madagascar. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1533.
Tucker, B. (2017). From risk and time preferences to cultural models of causality: On the challenges and possibilities of field experiments, with examples from rural southwestern Madagascar. In J. R. Stevens (Ed.), Impulsivity: How time and risk influence decision making (pp. 61–114). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51721-6_3
Turnbull, L., Hütt, M.-T., Ioannides, A. A., Kininmonth, S., Poeppl, R., Tockner, K., Bracken, L. J., Keesstra, S., Liu, L., Masselink, R., & Parsons, A. J. (2018). Connectivity and complex systems: Learning from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Applied Network Science, 3(1), 1–49.
Ullman, T. D., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2020). Bayesian models of conceptual development: Learning as building models of the world. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 2(1), 533–558.
Uzarevic, F., & Coleman, T. J. (2021). The psychology of nonbelievers. Current Opinion in Psychology, 40, 131–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.08.026
Van Fraassen, B. C. (1989). Laws and symmetry. Clarendon.
Van Stipriaan, A. (2003). Watramama/Mami wata: Three centuries of creolization of a water spirit in West Africa, Suriname and Europe. Matatu, (27/28):323–337.
Wellman, H. M., & Gelman, S. A. (1992). Cognitive development: Foundational theories of core domains. Annual Review of Psychology, 43(1), 337–375.
Whitehouse, H. (2011). The coexistence problem in psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory. Human Development, 54(3), 191–199.
Wilbert, W. (1987). The pneumatic theory of female Warao herbalists. Social Science & Medicine, 25(10), 1139–1146.
Willard, A. K. (2018). Defining religion. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(4), 449–451.
Wimsatt, W. C. (1987). False models as means to truer theories. In M. Nitecki & A. Hoffman (Eds.), Neutral models in biology (pp. 23–55). Oxford University Press.
Wimsatt, W. C. (2007). Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: Piecewise approximations to reality. Harvard University Press.
Winkelman, M. J. (2010). Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness and healing (2nd ed.). Praeger.
Winkelman, M. J. (2022). An ethnological analogy and biogenetic model for interpretation of religion and ritual in the past. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 29, 335–389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09523-9
Winkelman, M. J. (1984). A cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners. PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine.
Wojtowicz, Z., & DeDeo, S. (2020). From probability to consilience: How explanatory values implement Bayesian reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences., 24(12), 981–993. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.09.013
Woodward, J. (2006). Sensitive and insensitive causation. The Philosophical Review, 115(1), 1–50.
Worrall, J. (1989). Structural realism: The best of both worlds? Dialectica, 43(1–2), 99–124.
Yeung, A. W. K., Heinrich, M., Kijjoa, A., Tzvetkov, N. T., & Atanasov, A. G. (2020). The ethnopharmacological literature: An analysis of the scientific landscape. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 250, 112414.
Young, A. (1975). Magic as a” quasi-profession”: The organization of magic and magical healing among Amhara. Ethnology, 14(3), 245–265.
Acknowledgements
ADL and EHH acknowledge funding from the Issachar Fund and Templeton Religion Trust on the Religion and Science as Meaning-Making Systems project, and ADL acknowledges funding from the Aarhus University Research Foundation. We thank Michael Barlev, Theiss Bendixen, Pascal Boyer, Cynthiann Heckelsmiller, Kevin Hong, Martin Lang, Ben Purzycki, Tadeg Quillien, Uffe Schjødt, Kristen Syme, Jesper Sørensen, Michael Winkelman, the Religion, Cognition, and Culture team, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and feedback during the development of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare none.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Lightner, A.D., Hagen, E.H. All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities. Hum Nat 33, 425–462 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-022-09437-9
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-022-09437-9