244 mind
relevant to their well-being (like elves, goblins, and suchlike); but the ones
whose traces people think theysaware generally of greater emotional import.
Second, agents are postulated, not on the basis of direct perception of their
presence, but of indirect cues. As Barrett points out, what people claim to
perceive are more often “traces in the grass” than “faces in the clouds.” A
sudden noise, an unexplained shadow, a broken twig or someone’s sudden
death are explained as indices of the spirits’ presence; this is far more frequent
than a direct encounter with those agents. This feature makes much more
sense once we understand the contribution of predation-related mental sys-
tems, which after all are by design concerned with the interpretation of indirect
cues and fragmentary signals as evidence for some agent’s presence.
An association with predation-related intuitions is probably only part of
what makes religious concepts salient. We need additional factors to explain
what makes people’s notions of supernatural agents so stable and plausible,
and why they are so strongly informed by what other people say. To take the
first aspect, religious concepts are much less transient than experiences of
hyperactive agent detection, that is, of interpreting some noise or movement
as the presence of an agent. The latter are often discarded as mistakes. As I
said above, it makes sense to “over-detect” agents only if you can quickly dis-
card false positives, otherwise you would spend all your time recoiled in fear,
which is certainly not adaptive. But thoughts about gods and spirits are not
like that. These arestableconcepts, in the sense that people have them stored
in memory, reactivate them periodically and assume that these agents are a
permanent fixture in their environment. Now consider the sources of infor-
mation that shape people’s religious concepts. True, having experiences of elu-
sive shadows and sounds probably strengthens the general notion that there
may be unseen agents around. However, it is also striking that the details of
such representations are generally derived, not from what one has experienced
(hyperactive detection), but rather of what others have said. People take their
information about the features of ghosts and spirits and gods, to an over-
whelming extent, from socially transmitted information, not direct experience.
Conversely, intrinsically vague experiences are seen through the conceptual
lenses provided by what others said about the gods and spirits. To sum up,
people know vastly more about gods and spirits by listening to other people
than by encountering these mysterious agents.
I insist on this seemingly obvious point because it introduces yet another
way in which religious concepts activate mental systems. Information about
gods and spirits mainly comes from other people. It is also connected to our
representations of what other people believe and want in a crucial way. That
is, the way people construe religious agents is informed by mental systems
geared to describing and managing interaction with other human agents.