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Psychology

Global supernatural beliefs

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 670–671 (2023)Cite this article

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Supernatural beliefs shape how people understand the world, but there is debate regarding how these beliefs relate to the natural or social world. Jackson and colleagues quantitatively analysed the ethnographic record and found evidence that supernatural explanations are more commonly used for natural than for social phenomena.

The study combines multiple sources of data to answer this question. Ethnographic reports were coded to indicate whether supernatural explanations were common for three natural phenomena (disease, natural disasters and natural causes of food scarcity, such as drought) and three social phenomena (warfare, murder and theft). Supernatural explanations included appeals to supernatural agents (gods or shamans) and supernatural forces (karma or fate). This was combined with metadata for each society that indicated geographical location, socioecological factors and cultural relatedness through historical dependencies in linguistic phylogenies.

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References

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Matthew I. Billet & Ara Norenzayan

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  1. Matthew I. Billet
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  2. Ara Norenzayan
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Correspondence to Matthew I. Billet.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Billet, M.I., Norenzayan, A. Global supernatural beliefs. Nat Hum Behav 7, 670–671 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01568-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01568-y

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