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It’s thought that there might be some evolutionary benefit in assuming anything that happens around us—especially anything that defies our perception of environmental norms—is the consequence of some other conscious agent’s actions, rather than the result of some non-conscious mechanism.
In practice, this might mean that a rabbit hopping through the forest will be more likely to survive and procreate if it reflexively assumes that the sound of a twig snapping or the rustling of leaves nearby is an indication of a stalking predator, rather than just the consequence of the wind or other, similar process, and acts accordingly.
The downsides of too much caution in such circumstances are relatively minor compared to the negative consequences of the opposite. Wrongly assuming that those twig-snaps and leaf-rustles are just the wind could result in being eaten by a coyote or other predator, culling most of the chilled-out, unbothered rabbits from the gene-pool.
Thus, more of the rabbits that have survived to procreate would be prone to attributing such irregularities to other animals, rather than non-animal environmental factors.
This inclination is found in all sorts of animals, including humans, and is called agent detection. And although it’s up for debate whether this is an ingrained trait or something that we learn—as with most things biological and neurological, it’s almost certainly a bit of both—it is something for which we have a fair bit of supporting evidence across a great many species. It’s also consistent enough in how it manifests that most of the debate surrounding it is related to how it happened, not whether it’s happening.
In humans, it’s thought that our agent detecting predispositions may have played a role in the development of some spiritual practices, including religion.
As our ancestors looked around and saw things happening in the natural world, they may have instinctually categorized those things as the acts of an outside agent or agents.
So while rabbits subconsciously decide that noises in their environment are evidence of a nearby predator, we might look around at the changing colors of leaves, the birth and death cycle, and the sickness and healing of our kin and ascribe agent-related meaning to these things: someone is doing this stuff, rather than it being natural and unrelated to any other conscious being.
This is also possibly the source of many of our ghost and monster stories.
We ascribe the inexplicable sounds we hear throughout our homes at night to an outside agent, rather than the arguably far more likely case that they are actually just the result of the wind, of foundational instability, or of the house settling in a common and natural way.
It’s also possible that many of our conspiracy theories and seeming understandings about how the world works ties back to our agent detection leanings.
When there’s a pandemic, part of the population invariably decides that it’s just too perfect, too harmful to be natural, and thus, some entity—our government, some foreign government, or maybe a terrorist organization—is responsible.
When a scandal involving our public figure of choice emerges, this, too, must be the work of another person or agency, rather than the natural consequence of scandalous behavior naturally coming to light.
There are, of course, actual conspiracies. And some of the real-life examples of such are almost beyond belief: which lends weight to the argument that anything’s possible, and that we can’t always rely on Occam’s Razor to tell us what’s more or less likely based on what we currently know to be true.
Likewise, sometimes nature is nudged by an outside agent, and smallpox is spread intentionally, and the sounds that wake us up at night are caused by a conscious agent—not by ghosts, perhaps, but by raccoons in the attic. Sometimes the twig snapping is a predator and our instincts serve us well, if we listen to them.
Our tendency to anthropomorphize, though, leads us astray as often as it illuminates some heretofore unrecognized truth.
Thus, it’s important to both understand that our instincts might be miscalibrated when it comes to seeing ghosts, feeling divine intervention, and sensing conspiracies, but that it’s also possible, at times, that we’re perceiving some sort of truth—even if not necessarily the one that immediately comes to mind.
It’s possible, in other words, to utilize this reflex and then filter what we perceive for rational meaning: with time, learning more about the systems that cause leaves to rustle, twigs to snap, houses to creak, and diseases to spread.
Extracting information from the perception of being victimized or pursued can help us glean knowledge and understanding from these perceptual indicators so that we eventually learn what’s worth responding to, how best to respond, and what we can expect as a result of our actions.
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