shameful action and the ancestors' disapproval (potential false consen-
sus); some of her representations about ancestors are self-generated,
leading to good recall; this is also the case for religious specialists who
must tell other people how to perform rituals and how to interact with
ancestors, in effect improvising all sorts of new details about these
agents (generation effect); whether a certain event was directly per-
ceived or reported might become uncertain after a while (memory
illusion, source monitoring defects); once she assumes that ancestors
do intervene in people's affairs, occurrences that confirm this may
become more salient than others, thereby lending some support to the
[302] original assumption (confirmation bias); and even if some definite pre-
diction about the ancestors was refuted by experience, she might well
revise her memories of her past beliefs (dissonance reduction). Indeed,
this latter notion was developed to explain how members of apocalyp-
tic cults managed to cope with the fact that the appointed date for
Judgement Day had passed and nothing had happened. What social
psychologists found so striking was how a refuted prophecy seemed to
deepen commitment rather than shake it. Naturally, gods or a unique
God would be the same as the Kwaio ancestors from the point of view
of such psychological processes. The contexts in which people acquire
religious representations and communicate about such matters seem
particularly likely to result in such deviations from sound reasoning.
BELIEF AND THE JUDICIAL MODEL
All this is probably true, but is it sufficient? As I suggested in Chapter
1, such arguments are useless when we want to understand why peo-
ple believe in particular kinds of supernatural agency rather than oth-
ers. People have stories about vanishing islands and talking cats but
they usually do not insert them in their religious beliefs. In contrast,
people produce concepts of ghosts and person-like gods and make use
of these concepts when they think about a whole variety of social
questions (what is moral behavior, what to do with dead people, how
misfortune occurs, why perform rituals, etc.). This is much more pre-
cise than just relaxing the usual principles of sound reasoning.
But there is another, even more serious problem with the negli-
gence explanation. So far, we have assumed that there are some bits of
information represented in the mind, which people thenbelieve or
reject. In this view, what happens in the mind seems to require twoRELIGION EXPLAINED