Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

“Although it is nearly impossible to find a religion that doesn't endorse some anthropomorphic notion of religious agents (Guthrie, 1993 ), these anthropomorphic beliefs exist on a continuum, and cultural values that endorse certainty and an avoidance of ambiguity should motivate depictions of a…”

“Some proposed modules are so sensitive for our own benefits that they are able to give us a false-positive response in the same way as the shape of clouds can look like a face, as a false-positive response to our ability to recognize faces (Guthrie 1995).”

“…to ghosts) may be evolutionary byproducts of the Hyperactive Agency-Detection Device, an adaptation that favored humans who erred on the side of overattributing agency when it was absent, rather than missing signs of agency when a person or animal was really present (Barrett, 2004; Guthrie, 1993).”

“…on computer screens, voices in the wind, faces in the clouds, and virtually any complex design or uncertain circumstance of unknown origin This insight into the supernatural as the by-product of a hair-triggered agency detector was first elaborated by Guthrie (Guthrie 1993; cf. Hume 1756/1957).”

“Everyday discourse, scientific debates, and scholarly treatments of anthropomorphism have equated anthropomorphism with an overgeneralized error (e.g., Guthrie, 1993), and therefore hinge on whether anthropomorphism actually represents a mistaken representation of a nonhuman agent.”

“Awe may result from the perception of, and need to accommodate, vastness (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). This vastness can come in a perceptual form, like viewing the northern lights, or a conceptual form, like one’s first encounter with a theory that seems to explain almost everything (Yaden et al., 2016a). Participants of…”

“…familiar lay theories of human nature to non-human entities, people can reduce the amount of uncertainty they experience and make difficult to control situations seem predictable and more manageable (Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1993; Waytz, Morewedge, Epley, Monteleone, Gao, & Cacioppo, 2010).”

“The costs of getting it wrong in some instances are outweighed by the benefits of getting it right in others (Guthrie 1993 : 41).”

“Recent accounts of the origins of religiosity and religion have emphasized the intuitive and sometimes ‘‘minimally counterintuitive’’ nature of religious beliefs, generally making the case that such beliefs are a natural by-product of normal human cognition (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 1994; Frey, 2009; Guthrie…”

“mals [10,22–24,27,75].”

“In Faces in the Clouds, Guthrie (1993) displays a wealth of examples of such anthropomorphism (fig.”

“Prior work shows that characteristics of the object, for example, appearance (e.g., Graham and Poulin-Dubois 1999; Guthrie 1993) and movement (Morewedge et al. 2007; Tremoulet and Feldman 2000) influence the tendency to anthropomorphize.”

“Many have speculated that the source analogy for creationism is human action (e.g., Guthrie, 1993; Holyoak & Thagard, 1995; Piaget, 1929).”

“, friends, enemies and dangerous predatory animals) hypersensitivity to agency may be adaptive because it makes people wary in their interactions with the environment around them, reducing vulnerability to unexpected outcomes and avoiding risk from potentially dangerous factors (Barrett, 2004; Guthrie, 1993).”

“Anthropomorphic artifacts with a psychology, like for instance " listening statues " that hear and understand people's prayers, are construed as artifacts with nonstandard properties, intentional properties in this case (Guthrie, 1993; Boyer, 1996b; Barrett, 2000).”

“Instead, while culture plainly plays some role, some of the universals of religion are unlearned (see Atran, 2004; Barrett, 2004; Bering, in press; Boyer, 2001; Bloom, 2004, 2005; Evans, 2000, 2001; Guthrie, 1993; Kelemen, 2004; Pinker, 1997).”

“Customers respond favorably to these features through a process called anthro-pomorphization (Guthrie, 1993; Mourey et al., 2017).”

“A by-product of their functioning would be a tendency toward false positives (e.g., perceiving representations of human or animal figures in arbitrary collections of stars, or “faces in the clouds”; Guthrie, 1993).”

“In principle, almost any object of thought can become anthropomorphized, even invisible entities (e.g. ghosts; Bering, 2006) or purely symbolic concepts (e.g. brands; Aaker, 1997; for a review see Guthrie, 1993).”

“…as the first inventory of religious imagination that rests on the human ability to ascribe intentional agency to unexplainable occurrences (Barrett 2004), to make anthropomorphic projections into a metaphysical world (Guthrie 1993) and to blend ontologically distinct categories (Boyer 2001).”

“Anthropomorphism is a concept that touches several fields of study: psychology (H eider and Simmel 1944, Malle and Pearce 2001 , Barr ett and Keil 1996), marketing (A aker 1997), computer science (Duffy 2003, Kiesler et al. 2008) and religion (Guthrie 1995).”

“Guthrie (1995) found that anthropomorphic features can ease understanding of the product by familiarising the experience.”

“Another version of this idea focuses on the human tendency to project human-like characteristics to all types of non-human things, from clouds to chairs and automobiles, to pets and gods (e.g. Barrett, 2004; Guthrie, 1993; Hume, 1779/1981).”

“Believers intuitively treat gods as intentional agents with mental states who enter into social relationships with humans, using supernatural powers to assuage existential concerns, respond to human desires, and monitor their social behaviour [1–5].”

“As mentioned earlier, machine teachers can exist in a variety of forms including disembodied and embodied, and they can vary in degrees of anthropomorphism, which is the attribution of humanlike behaviors and characteristics to nonhuman agents (Guthrie, 1993).”

“Detecting and understanding the behaviors of agents such as animals can mean the difference between eating and becoming dinner, so it makes sense to be on the lookout out for them, even if it means mistakenly identify nonagents as agents (Guthrie, 1993).”

“The implication of such a grand claim, of course (further elaborated by Guthrie, 1993), is that the origins of the cognitive underpinnings of religious behavior are quite primitive, present in the mental architecture of the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.”

“Whilst some argue that religion is simply a cultural parasite (Blackmore, 1999; Dawkins, 1976, 2006; Dennett, 2006) or evolutionary by-product of other adaptive processes (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 2001; Guthrie, 1993; Pyysiäinen & Hauser, 2010), others see it as providing fitness advantages by guarding again…”

“Guthrie (1993, 1997) maintains that gods are explained by an overactive agent detector that cares little if a postulated agent has some nonhuman qualities such as invisibility because being able to reason about unseen agents would have had great survival value in our evolutionary past.”

“…cognitive systems that have evolved for understanding the physical and social world (for different versions of this proposal, see Atran 2004; Barrett 2004; Bloom 2004, 2007, 2009; Boyer 2001; Evans 2000, 2001; Guthrie 1993; Kelemen 2004; Pinker 1997; Pyysiäinen 2003; see Bloom 2009 for review).”

“One of the first theorists to apply cognitive psychology to religion was Stewart Guthrie who in his 1993 monograph Faces in the Clouds argued that religion is mainly a by-product of agency detection systems (Guthrie 1993).”

“Guthrie (1993) noted there are strong evolutionary pressures to be able to detect other agents in the environment to determine who might be a potential ally, enemy, predator, prey, or mate.”

“There may be various reasons for humans to have an “agent bias”—a natural inclination to ascribe agency, intentions, and emotions to non-human entities—stemming from our evolutionary history (Guthrie 1993).”

“It is argued that the tendency to see human faces or bodies in ambiguous shapes provided important fitness advantages to early humans, helping them to distinguish between friends and enemies, to rapidly recognize predators, and to establish alliances with other tribes (Guthrie, 1995; Bering, 2005).”

“Anthropomorphism refers to the psychological phenomenon of “attributing human characteristics to the nonhuman” (Guthrie, 1993, p. 62).”

“While religion is a cultural universal (Brown 1991), recent evolutionary psychological theories (Atran 2002; Boyer 2001; Guthrie 1993; Haselton and Nettle 2006; Kirkpatrick 2005) suggest that religiosity (belief in higher powers) may not be an adaptation in itself.”

“Specifically, there is evidence to suggest that people may be intrinsically disposed to invoke agency and intentional explanation in situations of uncertainty, or in the absence of knowledge (Barrett, 2000; Guthrie, 1993, 2002; Kelemen, 1999a).”

“Of course, given the breadth and magnitude of religious beliefs, there are undoubtedly many causes to their widespread adoption (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Boyer, 2003; Epley et al., 2008; Guthrie, 1993; Jonas & Fischer, 2006; McIntosh, 1995; Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006; Osarchuk & Tatz, 1973; Pargament, 1997; Park, 2005…”

“Anthropomorphism refers to the individual tendency to perceive inanimate objects as humanlike entities (Guthrie, 1993).”

“Unseen Forces, Spirits, and Animism Beginning perhaps most notably with Tylor (1873), theorists have long sought the roots of religion in the cognitive processes by which humans perceive and understand their environment (Guthrie, 1993).”

“However, most anthropomorphized portrayals are only partially human and are thus viewed as possessing particular human characteristics without being entirely human (partial anthropomorphism; see Guthrie 1993).”

“The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie suggests that humans evolved a propensity to anthropomorphize because failures to do so would have been more costly than overattribution (3).”

“According to the familiarity thesis [16], [17], [18] we anthropomorphize because it allows us to explain things we do not understand in terms that we do understand and what we understand best is ourselves as human beings.”

“Numerous scholars recently have argued that indigenous peoples throughout much of the North (and elsewhere) interacted with and understood animals in ways that fundamentally differ from modern Cartesian understandings (Bird-David, 1990; Bird-David, 1999; Descola, 1992; Fausto, 2007; Gutherie, 1993; Harvey, 2006; Ingol…”

“First, despite the cross-cultural ubiquity of religious and afterlife beliefs in funeral rites, anthropologists are quick to point out that religious beliefs are often far from comforting (Boyer, 2001; Guthrie, 1993).”

“In addition to the general interpretations of most cognitive research that religion is a byproduct, there are also a number of publications that explicitly argue against the adaptationist approach to religion (Gould, 1991; Boyer, 2001; Atran, 2002a; Atran and Norenzayan, 2004; Kirkpatrick, 2006, 2008; Martin, 2008).”

“Humans seem to live in a world in which potentially many non-self agents might potentially be seen as controlling the body (Guthrie, 1993).”

“In his foundational work, Guthrie (1980, 1995) argues that anthropomorphism—granting human-like characteristics to non-human entities—is a central feature of religion.”

“The consumer-brand relationship bond is enabled by anthropomorphism, which refers to the need, want, or desire to humanize everything, in order to simplify exchanges with the nonmaterial world (Fournier, 1998; Guthrie & Guthrie, 1995).”

“Supernatural beliefs exist because they are based in intuitions that arise out of the heuristic functions of theory of mind (Barrett, 2004; Guthrie, 1993).”

“People commonly anthropomorphize everyday objects and entities, such as when they see faces in the clouds (Guthrie, 1993), portray God in humanlike form (Lesher, 1992), or see a car “smiling” at them (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007).”

“The former have focused on the acquisition and transmission of religious concepts as byproducts of other cognitive capacities (e.g., Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 1994; 2001; Cohen, 2007; Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2007; Guthrie, 1993; Kirkpatrick, 2004; Lawson and McCauley, 1990; McCauley and Lawson, 2002; Shariff…”

“Attributing agency to otherwise non-agentive things may be the best bet for an organism’s fitness, because failing to detect agency when an agent exists, such as a predator, may mean the organism’s demise (Guthrie 1980, 1993, 1995).”

“People are prone to perceive illusory faces—in the clouds and in their food, for instance (Boyer, 2001; Guthrie, 1993; Riekki, Lindeman, Aleneff, Halme, & Nuortimo, 2013), to infer that ambiguous events have agentic causes (Gray & Wegner, 2010; Pepitone & Saffiotti, 1997; Weeks & Lupfer, 2000; Woolley et al.”

“Japan, China) (for discussion see Guthrie, 1993; also Momen, 1999; Spiro, 1966; Tambiah, 1970).”

“…work on product anthropomorphism (Aggarwal, 2004; Aggarwal and McGill, 2007; Chandler and Schwarz, 2010; Delbaere et al., 2011; Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1993; Kiesler, 2006; Kim and McGill, 2011; Landwehr et al., 2011) generally conclude that human appearance positively influences attitudes…”

“Anthropomorphism is characterized as a process where the highly accessible, early developing, and fundamental knowledge about human agents serves as an inductive base that is applied to nonhuman targets (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007; Guthrie, 1993).”

“Our advancing the preparedness hypothesis does not preclude the fact that God concepts in children and adults look strikingly anthropomorphic (Guthrie 1993).”

“1993); accordingly, there is wide cultural variation in mind perception (Cohen and Gunz 2002; Guthrie 1995).”

“Though they do not directly examine the intuition, prior researchers have suggested that anthropomorphism may occur on a continuum that ranges from being shallow and based on human schema to being rather deep and based on mind attribution (Aggarwal & McGill, 2017; Guthrie, 1993; Kim & McGill, 2011).”

“In situations such as this, the costs of different kinds of errors are asymmetric (Guthrie, 1993; Haselton & Buss, 2000; Öhman & Mineka, 2001).”