Belief as explanation: a motivation-based theory of agency and anthropomorphism in religious belief

Abstract

Supernatural agent beliefs are ubiquitous across cultures, yet many theories aimed at explaining this fact have not held up to scrutiny. The most famous of these, the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), has garnered several strong critiques and no supportive empirical evidence in almost 30 years. Yet, HADD is routinely cited as an explanation of why supernatural agent beliefs exist. We explore these problems and propose a new theoretical perspective to replace HADD. We suggest the tendency to create supernatural agents comes from the use of mental state reasoning to explain phenomenon beyond our current causal understanding. This is a non-automatic and cognitively effortful process. We review evidence that suggests we anthropomorphise when we are motivated to explain things we cannot explain using simpler causal mechanisms—like complex weather events or why good things happen to bad people. We argue this fits better than HADD with the evidence on how we use mental state reasoning to think about supernatural minds. This perspective allows us to account for two underspecified problems in the current literature: the shrinking domain of religion with the growth of science, and how to connect the origin of supernatural beliefs to the cultural evolution of religions.