Detecting agents around or in our vicinity , often on the basis of scant or unreliable evidence, is a hallmark of human minds. When we see branches moving in a tree or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent (animal or human) is the cause of this perceptually salient event and that some goal of that agent explains its behavior.
Note that the systems that detect agency do not need much solid evidence. what are those footsteps behind me? On the contrary, they “jump to conclusions,” that is, give us the intuition that an agent is around, in many contexts where other interpretations (the wind pushed the foliage, a branch just fell off a tree) are equally plausible. There are many everyday situations where we detect agency and then abandon this interpretation, once we realize there was no agent around
This is why we find, early developed in most humans, a hypertrophied “theory of mind” that tracks the objects of other people’s attention, computes their states of minds, predicts their behavior.
Another possible account is that at least some aspects of our “theory of mind” capacities evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction. A heightened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a better sense of how these other animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive significance.
In a species evolved to deal with both predators and prey, the expense of false positives (seeing agents where there are none) is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. By contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around (either predator or prey) could be very high. So our cognitive systems work on a better-safe-than-sorry principle that leads to hypersensitive agent detection.
Now consider the sources of information that shape people’s religious concepts. True, having experiences of elusive shadows and sounds probably strengthens the general notion that there may be unseen agents around. However, it is also striking that the details of such representations are generally derived, not from what one has experienced (hyperactive detection), but rather of what others have said.
People take their information about the features of ghosts and spirits and gods, to an overwhelming extent, from socially transmitted information, not direct experience. Conversely, intrinsically vague experiences are seen through the conceptual lenses provided by what others said about the gods and spirits. To sum up, people know vastly more about gods and spirits by listening to other people than by encountering these mysterious agents
In a species evolved to deal with both predators and prey, the expense of false positives (seeing agents where there are none) is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. By contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around (either predator or prey) could be very high. So our cognitive systems work on a better-safe-than-sorry principle that leads to hypersensitive agent detection.
Now consider the sources of information that shape people’s religious concepts. True, having experiences of elusive shadows and sounds probably strengthens the general notion that there may be unseen agents around. However, it is also striking that the details of such representations are generally derived, not from what one has experienced (hyperactive detection), but rather of what others have said.
People take their information about the features of ghosts and spirits and gods, to an overwhelming extent, from socially transmitted information, not direct experience. Conversely, intrinsically vague experiences are seen through the conceptual lenses provided by what others said about the gods and spirits. To sum up, people know vastly more about gods and spirits by listening to other people than by encountering these mysterious agents
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