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Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 707–717 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups.

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Fig. 1: The geographic location of the 114 societies in our sample.
Fig. 2: Word clouds for each domain.
Fig. 3: Documented supernatural explanations of natural and social phenomena of 107 societies on a language-based phylogeny.
Fig. 4: Relations between social complexity and supernatural explanation frequency.

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Data availability

All data are available from https://osf.io/jsk4t/. We sourced many of our variables from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and these variables are available from D-Place at https://d-place.org/. We sourced ethnographic records from eHRAF World Cultures. The eHRAF World Cultures database can be found at https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/.

Code availability

All code is available from https://osf.io/jsk4t/. All analyses were performed in R studio v.1.1.383 with the following packages: dplyr, ggplot2, ape, caper, phytools, MASS, phylolm, reshape2, rstudioapi and interactions.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and the Issachar Fund to J.C.J., B.B., J.W. and K.G. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We are grateful for the research assistance of M. Doucette, H. LaGarde, V. Easwar and S. Webb.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Joshua Conrad Jackson

  2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Danica Dillion, Nicholas DiMaggio & Kurt Gray

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Brock Bastian

  4. Religion Programme, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Joseph Watts

  5. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Institute, Jena, Germany

    Joseph Watts

  6. Department of Anthropology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    William Buckner

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Contributions

J.C.J., B.B. and K.G. conceptualized the study. J.C.J., D.D., W.B. and N.D. conducted the research. J.C.J., D.D. and J.W. analysed the data. J.C.J. and D.D. wrote the paper. All authors contributed to revising the paper.

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Correspondence to Joshua Conrad Jackson or Danica Dillion.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Pavel Duda, Ara Norenzayan, and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Jackson, J.C., Dillion, D., Bastian, B. et al. Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena. Nat Hum Behav 7, 707–717 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01558-0

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