Extending cognition through superstition: A niche-construction theory approach

Abstract

Superstitious practices have been considered since the ancient times as signs of deviating cognitive forms (such as the elders’), concerned with irrelevant causal relationships, and/or reducible to religious beliefs (and hence explained away). Recent theories such as the extended mind and cognitive niche construction, though, can shed new light on superstition and its apparently unreasonable success. The trigger is to observe how most superstitions are not mere “beliefs” (such as religious beliefs could be) hosted in a naked mind, but rather involve a strong coupling between the mind and some external props allowing its extensions away from the skull: from bodily gestures, to artifacts and other agents (human and animal). The mind’s capability to extend into the environment supports the related theory of cognitive niche construction, suggesting that human agents achieved better and better performances by creating external structures (cognitive niches) able to provide better and persistent scaffoldings for their cognitive performances. When it is not possible to detect and exploit the presence of a cognitive niche in the environment, superstitious practices can be identified as the possibility to deploy an emergency-cognitive niche projected by the superstitious agent into the world by means of a superstitious prop (item, ritual, gesture). It is poorer and less reliable but preferable to utter blank (and the consequent inaction), and most important it is still coupled with the external world (be it the body or its ecology in forms of artifacts and other agents), thus maintaining the fundamental characteristic of cognitive niches, that is distribution.