Agency Detection Task
The agency detection task is an experimental method in the cognitive science of religion that measures the human tendency to attribute ambiguous events to intentional agents - a tendency Justin Barrett named the Hyperactive (or Hypersensitive) Agency Detection Device, or HADD. Building on Stewart Guthrie's argument that people anthropomorphize the world, Barrett proposed in 2000 that an evolved bias to err on the side of detecting agents (better to mistake the wind for a predator than the reverse) provides a natural cognitive foundation for belief in gods, spirits, and ghosts. The task presents participants with ambiguous motion, sounds, or images and uses signal-detection theory to separate genuine sensitivity to agents from a liberal response criterion, then relates the resulting over-detection bias to supernatural belief.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Barrett, J. L. (2000). Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 29-34. · DOI 10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01419-9
- Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. · ISBN 9780465006953
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.