ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2021
The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices : The Case of Divination.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cognitive appeal promotes the persistence of inefficient solutions and hinders cumulative cultural evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Rhetoric of Disenchantment: Ghost Belief and Secular Critique in Early Twentieth-Century China.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Mysterious illnesses have supernatural and ritualistic cures: Evidence from 3,655 century-old Irish folk cures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- When Rituals Fail: Rationalization, Bayesianism, and Predictive Processing.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Evidential Vulnerability of Religious Beliefs in the Context of Petitionary Prayers.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Speech Repression and Threat Narratives in Politics: Social Goals and Cognitive Foundations.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- The emergence of a new pilgrimage as an assurance game.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Exposure to automation explains religious declines.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- The Cultural Evolution of Medical Technologies : A Model of Sequential Treatments in the Medical Setting.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Counterintuitive Pseudoscience Propagates by Exploiting the Mind's Communication Evaluation Mechanisms.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and we formally model the scenarios under which individuals may overestimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence. We found that strong prior belief, underreporting of negative evidence, and misinferring belief from behavior can all contribute to biased and inaccurate beliefs about the effectiveness of epistemic technologies. We finally suggest how scientific epistemology, as it emerged in Western societies over the past few centuries, has influenced the importance and cultural centrality of divination practices.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.