gods and the mental instincts that create them 245Religious Concepts Are about Social Interaction
A good part of the information concerning social interaction is processed by
specializedsocial mind systems. An important part of our mental architecture
consists of inference systems that deal with social interaction. For instance,
human beings are very good at:
- monitoring social exchange, that is, finding out who is cooperating
with whom, and under what circumstances, as well as punishing
cheaters and avoiding people who fail to punish cheaters;^18 - Keeping track of other people’s personality, especially in terms of relia-
bility, on the basis of indirect but emotionally charged cues;^19 - building and maintaining social hierarchies, based either directly on
resources or on indirect, seemingly arbitrary criteria for dominance;^20 - building coalitions, that is, stable cooperation networks where benefits
are shared, the cost of others defecting is high, and measures are
taken to preempt it;^21 - gossiping, that is, taking pleasure at receiving or imparting informa-
tion on adaptively significant domains (sex, resources, hierarchy),
about and with other members of one’s social network;^22
and many other such social interaction skills. It is quite likely that such capac-
ities are supported by a variety of functional systems, so that one does not so
much have a “social mind” as distinct social mind capacities.
In another paper,^23 I emphasized a crucial difference between represen-
tations of other people and representations of possible supernatural agents. All
standard social interaction, from a young age, is based on a principle of “im-
perfect access:” that is, the assumption that other people (and we ourselves)
only have partial access to the strategic information pertinent to a particular
situation. By contrast, supernatural agents seem to be implicitly construed as
“perfect access” agents. A tacit assumption is that, given a situationx, and
given some information about it that would be strategic, the supernatural agent
has access to it.
I must emphasize a few points that may be ambiguous in the above for-
mulation. This assumption often remains tacit. You do not need to represent
an explicit principle like “the ancestors have access to what matters to our social
mind systems” anymore than we need to represent a principle of the form
“objects that are bounced against a wall will bounce at an angle equal to the
collision angle.”
The assumption does not require that people represent what the strategic
information in question amounts to. You can represent that “if there is strategic
information about this situation, the ancestors know it” without having any
description of the strategic information in question. (In the same way, your