Gods in Mind: Cognitive Theories of Supernatural Agency Flashcards
What are supernatural agents?
Beings that are a mix between human and object. They are highly prevalent in myths, stories and popular entertainment. They include ordinary features and attributes with extraordinary features and attributes.
The social function of intellect (Humphrey, 1976)
Intelligence and consciousness has a social purpose to interact with other humans and beings on the planet.
Social Brain Hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998)
Selection happened through social pressures like mate selection and knowing foe from friend.
Charlton (2000) and Humphrey (1976)
Human consciousness was shaped by living in groups.
Anthropomorphism (Guthrie, 1993)
People tend to humanise objects they see in life as an adapted behaviour
Hypertrophy of agency (Boyer, 2001)
Religion always has supernatural agents, even if there is no purpose for them
How do we create supernatural agents?
We create agents when we witness objects that violate the assumptions of movement (inert movement patterns), events that have no cause (random crash in the house means there’s a burglar), or purposeful traces (sticks lying in random order have meaning). This leads to us theorising the agent’s desires and beliefs.
Why do we create supernatural agents? (Guthrie, 1993)
Testing anthropomorphism using Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD). Found that if we don’t detect a human-like being but the being is present, it is high cost. But if we detect an agent while it is not present it is low cost. Therefore it’s better for us to detect a human-like person even if it isn’t there.
Sperber (1997)
It takes a certain mind to theorise supernatural agents, a mind that all humans have. We come to the world as a blank slate, our cognition has ready made processes to process information (intuitive) but also has more slow, deliberate thinking (reflective).
Intuitive mind of thinking
May or may not be conscious or explicit
Produced automatically and rapidly
Produced by one or a small number of related mental tools
Typically strong within-group uniformity
Reflective mind of thinking
Consciously/explicitly held
Produced deliberately and often slowly
Draws on outputs of many mental tools and memories
Great potential for within-group variation
Ontological categories
We categorise everything in life into categories: person, animal, artefact, plant.
Inference systems
We can assume the psychology, biology and physical attributes of certain categories (human, animal, artefact, plant). We can only assume the psychology of humans and animals, the biology of human, animals and plants, and the physical attributes of humans, animals, artefacts and plants.
How are natural concepts formed?
We need a name for the concept, then a category, with the category we have expectations (plants have roots, humans have eyes, animals don’t speak English), then we add more detail.
What happens if a new word fails our expectations? (Boyer, 2001)
We transfer the information from one category to the other (mix human characteristics with animal characteristics) or the expectation for the new word is completely breeched.
