The places of agency detection and predictive processing in the ontogenesis of religious belief; and “Who put the ‘H’ in the HADD?”

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the origin of the hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agent (or agency) detection device (HADD) and its ‘places’ in the ontogenesis of religion. In 1. I engage in a preamble surrounding correspondence with Robert McCauley, Justin Barrett, and Tom Lawson on the origins of the HADD idea. In 2. I explain the roles HADD is purported to have had in the evolution of religion and a religious mindset from two potentially conflicting perspectives. I claim there is confusion where these two perspectives are not properly demarcated. In 3. I trace the evolution of the HADD concept. At 4. I outline the current condition of the HADD idea in light of several objections to it. I conclude that a) although history does not support the origins of the HADD idea as having any one single author, it is Barrett who spearheaded it and defended it, thusly galvanising his name to the concept historically; b) that as it is described in 2a it is compatible with predictive processing as described in 2b; and c) that the concept of HADD in its variant forms still excites philosophical and empirical questions, the answers to which are relevant to the science versus religion debate.

KEYWORDS:

• Hyperactive agent detection device
• hypersensitive agency detection device
• religion
• cultural evolution
• predictive processing
• atheism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tom Lawson, Robert McCauley, and especially Justin Barrett for their permission to relay this material and their helpful comments. I would also like to thank Michiel van Elk for his input after the 2022 Religion and the Mind conference at Jagiellonian University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By “positive” theism I mean the claim that “there is a God”; I allude to the distinction between positive and negative atheism, or explicit and implicit atheism (Martin, 1990).

2 For instance, “modules” (e.g. facial recognition) take input in a specific format (e.g. the facial information will work the right way up, but not upside down), but the way agency detection is often discussed appears to allow for a number of things ranging from sensed presence, to movement in point light displays, to facial recognition.

3 Barrett still maintains that he had been talking about agency detection during lectures well before the conference in Finland.

4 Agency detection might be supposed of many organisms, and is by no means a special attribute of Homo sapiens.

5 Barrett is referring to himself in the third person here.

6 Barrett elaborated that these early discussions of agency detection were meant to be a more cognitive specification of the sort of information processing that Stewart Guthrie had called anthropomorphism (Guthrie et al., 1980).

7 Barrett and Church go one step further in supposing that belief is warranted in a designer God as responsible for the various cognitive mechanisms which support religious belief, generally (Barrett & Church, 2014, p. 319).

8 I note here that some might argue that this approaches something like a sensus divinitatis, but it is at some remove indeed, for the latter (if it even exists) would surely come with a sense of reckoning and awe. The former is perhaps implied in the latter, but by no means does the former encapsulate the latter.

9 Some have argued that predictive processing can give rise to a cognitive bias that closely resembles the operations of the HADD (see, for example, Van Eyghen (2022). On such an account, it is no longer a modular, natural cognitive mechanism but it does reliably make humans hypersensitive in detecting agents.

10 This concern is indeed echoed by van Elk: “Without solid empirical evidence, the religion-as byproduct hypothesis remains nothing more than a “just-so-story”; i.e., a possible but not necessarily correct interpretation of our evolutionary past” (2016, p. 6). There is, however, good reason to move away from “just-so-story” concerns, toward abductive reasoning and inference to the best explanation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland [grant number 2019/34/H/HS1/00654].