into account not just the imagined friend's personality but also past
events in their relationship. Taylor's studies show that wishful thinking
plays only a minor role in such fantasies. What the companions do or
say is constrained by the persons they are, and this has to remain con-
sistent and plausible even in this fantastic domain. A four-year-old has
sophisticated skills at representing not only an agent where there is
none but also an agent with a specific history and personality, with
particular tastes and capacities different from one's own. Companions
are often used to provide an alternative viewpoint on a situation. They
may find odd information unsurprising, or frightening situations man-
[150] ageable.^6
So it is extremely easy, from an early age, to maintain social rela-
tions in a decoupledmode. From an early age, children have the social
capacities required to maintain coherent representations of interaction
with persons even when these persons are not actually around and do
not in fact exist.
It would be tempting at this point to drift into a not-too-rigorous
parallel between such imagined companions and the supernatural
agents with which people seem to establish long and important rela-
tions, such as guardian angels, spirits and ancestors. (Indeed, the very
term imaginary companion used by modern-day psychologists seems to
echo the phrase invisible friend [aoratos philos] used to describe the
saints in early Christianity.) But the differences are as great as the sim-
ilarities. First, for many people spirits and ancestors are emphatically
not fantasies, there is a sense that they are actually around. Second,
believers do not just construct their own decoupled interaction; they
share with others information about who the spirits are and what they
do. Third and most important, the tenor of people's relations with
spirits and gods is special because of one crucial characteristic of these
supernatural agents, as we will see presently.
STRATEGIC INFORMATION
Interacting with other agents (giving or exchanging, promising, coop-
erating, cheating, etc.) requires a social mind—that is, a variety of
mental systems specially designed to organize interaction. This is cru-
cial because the social mind systems are the ones that produce the
great similarity between supernatural agents and persons as well as
the crucial difference that makes the latter so important.RELIGION EXPLAINED