The Agential View of Misfortune.
Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) March 1, 2024 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s12110-024-09470-w via PubMed
Summary
In many small-scale societies, misfortunes like death are often blamed on others' harmful magic, a pattern called the agential view of misfortune. This view is false and imposes costs that seem to outweigh any benefits, making its persistence puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. It is not easily explained as an adaptive belief or a byproduct of otherwise useful thinking. A partial explanation is that occult specialists gain advantages in such environments, but the general lack of resistance to their exploitation over time remains unexplained. The authors explore possible reasons for this lack of resistance.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | The agential view of misfortune is costly and false, yet persists in small-scale societies; its prevalence demands a special evolutionary explanation, partly due to benefits for occult specialists, but the lack of resistance to exploitation remains puzzling. |
Abstract
In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others' malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies "the agential view of misfortune." After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the view might provide. We thus doubt that the agential view of misfortune is explainable in terms of adaptive effects. However, neither does it seem readily explainable as a consequence of belief formation strategies that are on the whole adaptive (as is plausibly the case for certain other of our false beliefs, including some that are costly). Accordingly, we contend that the commonness of the agential view of misfortune demands a special evolutionary explanation of some kind. We provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon by highlighting the adaptive benefits that often flow to occult specialists in environments where the agential view of misfortune is entrenched. What this does not explain, however, is the general lack of resistance we observe in response to occultists' exploitative behaviours over (cultural) evolutionary timescales. We conclude by canvassing a few possible explanations for this puzzling lack of resistance, and while we commit ourselves to none, we do find one option more promising than the others.