Cultural evolution of supernatural narratives in ancient China

Evolutionary approaches suggest that individual preferences, inference strategies, and motivational priorities are facultative and calibrated to ecological conditions. Two partially independent dimensions are especially relevant for understanding the cultural evolution of supernatural narratives: (i) inference strategies under uncertainty and (ii) the relative salience of motivational systems. First, research on error management shows that when the costs of inference errors are asymmetric, natural selection favors biased inference strategies (Foster & Kokko, 2009). When failing to detect a real causal threat (Type II error) is more costly than falsely inferring causality (Type I error), individuals are expected to over-detect agency and causation, producing superstition-like beliefs. Importantly, such inference strategies are not historically fixed. Ecological, technological, and institutional changes systematically modify the relative costs of Type I and Type II errors, shifting the optimal balance between credulity and skepticism. As existential insecurity decreases and affluence increases, the cost of Type II errors declines, favoring more skeptical interpretations of ambiguous events and a reduced seriousness attributed to supernatural explanations. Second, and orthogonal to superstition per se, ecological conditions also shape the relative activation of motivational systems. In harsh and unpredictable environments, cognitive and motivational resources are preferentially allocated to physical survival and threat avoidance. As environments become safer and more predictable, survival-related motivations decline in salience, and other motivational systems become increasingly prominent. These include social regulation and norm enforcement—which become valuable when cooperation yields high returns—and imaginative exploration and curiosity, which are favored when basic needs are satisfied and the costs of exploration are low. Crucially, changes in motivational priorities need not track changes in superstition in a one-to-one manner. A narrative can be low in superstition while remaining strongly oriented toward moral regulation, or high in imagination without being credulous. Supernatural narratives thus provide a unique window into both inference styles and motivational trade-offs, allowing these dimensions to be empirically disentangled. We derive four predictions concerning how shifts in existential insecurity and affluence should be reflected in the motivational content of supernatural narratives. We also explore five hypotheses related to known variations in patriarchy and misogyny in China.