Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

“A process considered by some to be fundamental to animism and the origins of religion; see Guthrie (1993).”

“Guthrie proposes that humans instinctively perceive the world in a maximally significant and “humanlike” way (Guthrie, 1993, p. 4), reasoning that it is more adaptive to momentarily perceive a boulder as a bear, than to mistake a bear for a boulder (Guthrie, 1993, p. 6).”

“Frontiers in Psychology 02 frontiersin.org Guthrie (1993) has defined three forms of anthropomorphism “partial, literal, and accidental.””

“From here they put forward what they call an ‘ecocentric’ view of animism instead of the conventional anthropocentric viewpoint, according to which animism consists in seeing non-human things as humans or human like (Guthrie 1993).”

“As humans, we are prone to detect agency in the world whether it is sentient or not (Guthrie 1993:74).”

“…level of the overall product or packaging design, the first (and most direct) type of embodiment reflects consumers’ inclination to easily detect human features or traits in products, a tendency generally referred to as personification or anthropomorphism (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007; Guthrie, 1993).”

“In these roles, anthropomorphism looms large in religion, particularly in the representation of supernatural agents (Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1980, 1993; Hodge, 2006; Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, 2015).”

“Therefore, humans possess evolved cognitive mechanisms for perceiving other humans, mechanisms that allow the recognition of other humans, human behavior, and the consequences of human behavior (Guthrie, 1993).”

“…for “hyperactive” or “hypersensitive” agency detection, whereby asymmetric costs – relatively costly false negatives and relatively cheap false positives – supposedly lead to the evolution of biased agent-detection mechanisms (Barrett, 2000, 2004, 2012; Guthrie, 1993; Guthrie et al., 1980).”

“First, there is a psychological story to tell—in this case involving what Boyer (2001; cf. Guthrie 1993, Bloom 2007) calls a “hypertrophy of social cognition”—in which we tend to overattribute psychological agency (our “theory of mind module” delivers many false positives).”

“( Guthrie 1993 ; Barrett 1996 and 2000; Pyysiainen, in press; cf. Burkert 1996).”

“The reason lies in the way our minds work (Guthrie, 1993; Barrett, 2000; Djurišičová, 2010a, b).”

“This component integrates evidence from psychological work on perceptual recognition, reasoning and heuristics, and episteomological work on folk and scientific explanation.”

“…fashion, as if these other-thanhuman things possessed human-like agency (see Barrett 2007 for comparative psychological results and Guthrie 1993 for comparative cross-cultural results showing how people around the globe communicate with other-than-human rocks, plants, and animals).”

“Guthrie (1993) has argued that a bias toward inferring the presence of agents would have been adaptive in the evolutionary past: “It is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear, than to mistake a bear for a boulder” (1993, p. 6).”

“54 Horton 1960, 211, cited by Guthrie 1993, 33.”

“One previously untested suggestion has been that the process of attributing humanlike characteristics to nonhuman agents unfolds in an automatic manner (Guthrie, 1993) and that the same basic cognitive processes that underlie the perception of human entities should underlie nonhuman entities (Epley et al,, 2007).”

“Anthropomorphism is a cognitive process through which human characteristics are attributed to non-human entities or events (Guthrie, 1993; Waytz et al., 2014).”

“It therefore has adaptive value to be sensitive to possible agency (Guthrie, 1993), putting selection pressure on the human brain to evolve mental models that detect agency in the environment (Barrett, 2004).”

“…with imagined kin. are partially explicable in terms of how well they fit with how ordinary human cognitive systems – working in ordinary human environments – predictably give rise to and sustain their transmission (e.g., Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2011; Bering, 2011; Guthrie, 1993; Pyysiäinen, 2001).”

“During the first century bc , Vitruvius, a Roman architect, described architecture in relation to the human body (Guthrie, 1995).”

“According to Guthrie (2003), people’s personifying predisposition goes back to the dawn of time, when the ancients saw astrological creatures in the constellations, advancing armies in the clouds, and wrathful deities in wild weather.”

“Guthrie and Guthrie (1995) proposed three types of anthropomorphism: partial, literal, and accidental.”

“Older cognitive accounts approached the cultural prevalence of special anthropomorphic agents by proposing an evolved brain module responsible for creating agent-like perceptions (Atran, 2002; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett, 2000, 2004, 2007; Guthrie, 1980, 1996, 1993).”

“Indeed, although di ff erent terminology is used therein, Guthrie (1993) cannot be ignored, and we absolutely cannot forget Charles Darwin ’ s observation ’ s in The Descent of Man (1871) (Darwin 2009, pp. 65 – 69).”

“, invisibility) (Guthrie, 1995; Boyer, 2002) or geometric figures (Heider and Simmel, 1944).”

“Some emphasize evolved cognitive faculties such as agency detection, anthropomorphism, and other mentalizing systems to account for beliefs in gods (e.g., Andersen, 2019; Bird-David, 1999; Barrett, 2000; Guthrie, 1980, 1995).”

“Citing J. L. Barrett & Lanman, 2008; Guthrie, 1980, 1993).”

“Taves’ work is not alone here; in the past 30 or so years the field of CSR has produced multiple works from scholars of more traditional Geisteswißenschaft, such as anthropology (e.g., Guthrie, 1993; Malley, 2004; Malley & Barrett, 2003; Pyysiäinen, 2009).”

“Shaw-Williams, K. (2014). The social trackways theory of the evolution of human cognition. Biological Theory, 9(1), 16–26. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991). A terror management theory of social behavior: The psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural worldviews. Advances in Experimental So…”

“Instead, such attribution is spontaneous, unavoidable, and deeply intuitive, as philosophers since Spinoza and Hume, and now cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and others (e.g., Beit-Hallahmi, 2009; Farah & Heberlein, 2007; Wegner, 2005), have said (Guthrie 1980, 1993, 2007, in press).”

“…input is rapidly organized to find order in Archive for the Psychology of Religion 38 (2016) 232-251 apparently-random events (Barrett, 2007; Guthrie, 1995; Simmonds-Moore, 2014), and where interpreting something as meaningful (e.g., friend or foe) can have immediate consequences for…”

“Humans are primed to interpret ambiguous situation (like the fluttering of leaves) as being caused by agency (Barrett, 2000; Guthrie, 1995) and to reading social meaning into natural events (Bering, 2002).”

“Although there are several notable exceptions (e.g., Atran, 2002; Boyer, 2010; Bulbulia, 2004; Guthrie, 1993; Lewis-Williams, 2010), most CSR scholars seem hesitant to draw any explicit conclusions about the actual existence of the gods (or God) conceived in the human minds they study.”

“The anthropologist Guthrie (1993) has defended a similar claim: anthropomorphism lies at the basis of belief in supernatural beings.”

“(NHR, p. 141; see also Guthrie, 1993, pp. 186–187) The claim that human beings are prone to anthropomorphism is grounded in the cognitive psychology of the Treatise .”

“to consider the mental states of human actors when thinking about their role in a natural disaster, at other times they may interpret natural or supernatural forces in agentic terms (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007; Guthrie, 1993), leading people to inadvertently apply social cognitive knowledge structures when interpr…”

“…explanations emerged for natural phenomena, many things we now take for granted the sun, stars, seasons, lightning, thunder, eclipses, rain, fire, droughts, tides, earthquakes, births, deaths, disease were often considered unfathomable miracles (Bering, 2002; Frazer, 1922/1996; Guthrie, 1993).”

“It is what I would prefer to call an analogy or a key metaphor (cf. Fernandez 1974; Guthrie 1995; Lakoff and Johnson 1980).”

“Classic examples include perceiving faces in clouds (Guthrie 1993), por-traying nature as a nurturing mother (Liu et al. 2019), and using brand mascots such as the Michelin Man.”

“…adults perceiving slight humanness in inanimate objects, and only a few reporting more extreme perceptions of human qualities ( e.g. , Bloom, 2007 ; Chin et al., 2005 ; Epley, Waytz & Cacioppo, 2007 ; Guthrie, 1993 ; Haslam et al., 2008 ; Severson & Lemm, 2016 ; Waytz, Cacioppo & Epley, 2010 ).”

“People tend to perceive inanimate objects as having a creaturely nature (Guthrie, 1993).”

“49 It has recently been argued that anthropomorphism 50 – 52 is associated with speci fi c hallucinations 53 ; however, this has not been tested in patients with PD. Recent work in human neuroscience has described specialized visual mechanisms 54 and brain regions involved in the processing of…”

“Indeed, if we were to take another page from Guthrie (1995), we can allow that (a) it is generally more adaptive to ‘bet’ that the world contains other subjective agents than not, but also (b) that multiple neural structures will likely have affinity for detecting different ranges of typically…”

“There is a tendency for humans to anthropomorphize features resembling faces (Guthrie 1995; Haxby et al. 2000).”

“…anthrōpos (human) and morphē (form), anthropomorphism refers to the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman beings in its generally accepted definition (Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1995) and is considered to be a universal human tendency (Brown, 1991; Guthrie, 1980, 1995; Mithen, 1996).”

“Anthropomorphism refers to an individual's tendency to see inanimate objects as human-like entities (Guthrie, 1995).”

“This is a point that shares overlap with Stewart Guthrie’s account of anthropomorphism as an innate feature of human thought (Guthrie 1995).”

“Lebih lanjut Ouwersloot dan Tudorica (2001) mengemukakan bahwa aktivitas pemasaran mempengaruhi kepribadian merek, dan Batra, Lehmann, dan Singh (1993) menyatakan bahwa kepribadian suatu merek diciptakan dalam jangka waktu yang lama karena tersusun dari semua komponen pemasaran. anteseden pemasaran dari pengeluaran ik…”

“The first mechanism was originally suggested by Stephen Guthrie and its main task is to over-interpret a self-perpelled motion as caused by an intentional agent equipped with mental states (Guthrie, 1993).”

“Deified protectors are often construed as having human form (Guthrie, 1993; Boyer, 1996, p. 87; Clark & Winslett, 2011).”

“The human cognitive predisposition to readily identify agency in the phenomena of the world (Guthrie 1993), what Barrett (2000) calls the hyperactive agency detection device, likely underlies the widespread human perception of gods and spirits.2 Subsequently, deities are assigned to general…”

“The cognitive science of religion approach blends these perspectives and proposes that religious concepts are especially likely to arise and spread because they stem from ordinary cognitive processes that humans use to make inferences about other people and the world (e.g., Atran 2002; Barrett 2000; Boyer 2001; Guthri…”