Supernatural Explanations and Norm Enforcement in Nine Societies

Historical and ethnographic evidence suggests that people around the world use supernatural beliefs to explain misfortune. The cross-cultural prevalence of this pattern may arise from our expectations that norm violations lead to sanctioning. In cases where an outcome seems punitive yet lacks an identifiable cause, individuals, motivated to fill this explanatory gap, may rely on beliefs in supernatural punishment to make sense of what has happened. If true, supernatural explanations for misfortunes should be more common when a victim is believed to have not cooperated in the past (i.e., in cases where misfortunes might be unexplained but otherwise appear deserved). Using a vignette experiment across nine diverse populations (N = 714), including African hunter-gatherers and Melanesian horticulturalists, we tested if knowledge of past bad actions increased participants’ endorsements of supernatural causes for misfortune. Across all populations, participants rated a misfortune as more likely to be supernaturally caused when the victim was known to have failed to reciprocate a favour or engage in generous actions toward others in the past. This was slightly increased when the behaviour was additionally labelled normative. Responses to open-ended free-listing questions provide additional evidence that when the victim was known to be uncooperative, participants were more likely to propose supernatural causes for misfortune as well as supernatural solutions. Additional normative labelling had only a small effect. Together, these findings suggest that when misfortunes lack clear causes, people’s motivation to explain interacts with moral evaluations, leading them to invoke supernatural beliefs most commonly when misfortune appears deserved.