gods and the mental instincts that create them 243objects in the environment are goal-directed) or gaze-following.^14 Children with
Williams syndrome are very good at detecting, following, and displaying emo-
tional cues relevant to social interaction, although they often have a very poor
understanding of the beliefs and intentions that motivate behavior.^15 In a sim-
ilar way, chimpanzees may pay attention to gaze-direction without associating
it with specific intentions, which shows that these two capacities are separa-
ble.^16
Now, if there are several distinct theory of mind components, there may
be different ways in which human minds can postulate agents without much
evidence. Indeed, I would argue that supernatural agents are made salient and
relevant to human minds by two distinct routes, each of which contributes a
particular aspects of these imagined agent. The first route is through those
systems we developed in predator-prey interaction; the second one is though
those systems that are especially dedicated to social interaction.
As Guthrie emphasized, detecting agents around, often on the basis of
scant or unreliable evidence, is a hallmark of human minds. When we see
branches moving in a tree or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us,
we immediately infer that someagent(animal or human) is the cause of this
perceptually salient event and that some goal of that agent explains its behavior.
Note that the systems that detect agency do not need much solid evidence. On
the contrary, they “jump to conclusions,” that is, give us the intuition that an
agent is around, in many contexts where other interpretations (the wind
pushed the foliage, a branch just fell off a tree) are equally plausible. There are
many everyday situations where we detect agency and then abandon this in-
terpretation, once we realize there was no agent around. But, that is the im-
portant point, we spontaneously create these interpretations anyway. For Justin
Barrett, there are important evolutionary reasons why we (as well as other
animals) should have “hyperactive agent detection.” In a species evolved to deal
with both predators and prey, the expense of false positives (seeing agents
where there are none) is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intui-
tions quickly. By contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually
around (either predator or prey) could be very high. So our cognitive systems
work on a better-safe-than-sorry principle that leads to hypersensitive agent
detection.^17
According to this evolutionary interpretation, predation-related capacities
not only makes it easy to detect agents when there is little or no evidence for
their presence, but also informs some of their features. For one thing, our
agent-detection systems trigger emotional arousal in a way that is quite auto-
matic. That is, these systems lead us intuitively to assume, not just that there
are agents around but that this presence may have rather dramatic conse-
quences for us. This is a feature that directly translates in supernatural imag-
ination. People may well imagine all sorts of supernatural agents that are ir-