ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Mysterious illnesses have supernatural and ritualistic cures: Evidence from 3,655 century-old Irish folk cures.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Explaining supernatural cures for poorly understood illnesses: Revisiting classic questions with new evidence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Why and when do people draw upon religious and supernatural solutions to problems? Cognitive scientists and anthropologists have proposed a range of answers, stressing religion and ritual's capacity to alleviate anxiety, create a sense of order, or explain otherwise inexplicable events. Here, we leverage a unique dataset of 3,655 folk cures for 35 diseases, collected in 1937/8 from a mostly rural Irish sample born roughly between 1850 and 1925. Since the diseases vary in theory-relevant ways and the cures vary in the degree to which they include religious and supernatural elements, this dataset facilitates a unique test of these predictions in a premodern western population. In preregistered tests, we find that diseases judged by two doctors to have causes and mechanisms that would be unclear to the patients were more likely to have supernatural/religious treatments. Contra common predictions, severe and disabling diseases did not have more supernatural/religious cures and anxiety-provoking diseases did not have more ritualistic cures.
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.