Cross-culturally, misfortune is often attributed to witchcraft despite the high human and social costs of these beliefs. The evolved cognitive features that are often used to explain religion more broadly, in combination with threat perception and coalitional psychology, may help explain why these particular supernatural beliefs are so prevalent. Witches are minimally counter intuitive, agentic, and build upon intuitive understandings of ritual efficacy. Witchcraft beliefs may gain traction in threatening contexts and because they are threatening themselves, while simultaneously activating coalitional (...) reasoning systems that make rejection of the idea costly. This article draws possible connections between these cognitive and environmental features with an eye toward future empirical examination. (shrink)

Specific features of our evolved cognitive architecture explain why some aspects of the economy are “seen” and others are “not seen.” Drawing from the commentaries of economists, psychologists, and other social scientists on our original proposal, we propose a more precise model of the acquisition and spread of folk-beliefs about the economy. In particular, we try to provide a clearer delimitation of the field of folk-economic beliefs and to dispel possible misunderstandings of the role of variation in evolutionary psychology. We (...) also comment on the difficulty of explaining folk-economic beliefs in terms of domain-general processes or biases, as developmental studies show how encounters with specific environments calibrate domain-specific systems. We offer a more detailed description of the connections between economic beliefs and political psychology and of the probable causes of individual variation in that domain. Taken together, these arguments point to a better integration or consilience between economics and human evolution. (shrink)