Abstracts Anthropology

Supernatural explanations for negative life events: The roles of morality and predictability

by Mathilde Hernu

This doctoral thesis aims to better understand why and to what extent people invoke supernatural explanations when unpredictable negative life events (such as misfortunes, illnesses, and natural catastrophes) occur. Supernatural explanations are found in most (if not all) cultures around the world. Often, people do not solely call to supernatural explanations, as they are aware that some natural factors must also play a causal role in bringing about negative events. Research has also shown that supernatural thinking does not result from simply filling in a knowledge gap or from people's previous beliefs. This thesis investigates two psychological mechanisms that may explain how supernatural explanations come readily into mind: (1) a need for predictability, and (2) an intuitive understanding of causal links in terms of morality. Based on previous research, two main cognitive aspects are thought to underpin predictability: (1) certainty, i.e., whether information about natural causal factors is available or lacking, and (2) frequency, i.e., whether an event happens frequently or rarely. It is first hypothesized that supernatural explanations may serve a compensatory psychological function and be invoked when negative life events happen because they help restore our need for predictability when it is threatened, that is, when aspects of an event are uncertain or infrequent. However, supernatural explanations for misfortunes, illnesses, and natural catastrophes, often bear a moral component. Who has never thought whilst hearing about somebody’s woe, “he did not deserve this, he is a good person” or conversely, “he had it coming”? The second hypothesis is that information about the moral status of people’s previous actions (e.g., the action being morally wrong) triggers supernatural explanations (e.g., supernatural agents bring about negative events as punishment for people’s wrongdoings) as a direct consequence of the way our evolved moral cognitive processes work, resulting in intuitive moral causation. Two experimental studies manipulating variables related to predictability and morality in the context of scenario research were implemented as an online questionnaire to test these hypotheses. Study 1 first tested the role of certainty (in the form of availability of information about the natural causes of an event) and the role of moral information (wrongdoing versus rightdoing versus no moral information) in triggering supernatural causal attributions. A secondary aim was to verify two dispositional tendencies related to the need for predictability: individuals' tendencies to be aversive to uncertainty on the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (IUS) and individuals' tendencies to detect illusory patterns in pictures containing random noise (snowy pictures). In the following studies, two measures of supernatural causal thinking were implemented and measured different psychological processes: (1) the qualitative measure, which assessed participants’ explicit beliefs about the supernatural causation of an event,…