Abstract

In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others’ malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies “the agential view of misfortune.” After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the view might provide. We thus doubt that the agential view of misfortune is explainable in terms of adaptive effects. However, neither does it seem readily explainable as a consequence of belief formation strategies that are on the whole adaptive (as is plausibly the case for certain other of our false beliefs, including some that are costly). Accordingly, we contend that the commonness of the agential view of misfortune demands a special evolutionary explanation of some kind. We provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon by highlighting the adaptive benefits that often flow to occult specialists in environments where the agential view of misfortune is entrenched. What this does not explain, however, is the general lack of resistance we observe in response to occultists’ exploitative behaviours over (cultural) evolutionary timescales. We conclude by canvassing a few possible explanations for this puzzling lack of resistance, and while we commit ourselves to none, we do find one option more promising than the others.