Inferring Intentional Agents From Violation of Randomness

Humans have a strong “cognitive compulsion” to infer intentional agents from violation of randomness and such an agency–nonrandomness link emerges early in development. In two studies, we directly quantified, formalized, and compared both ends of this link for the first time. In Experiment 1, two groups of participants viewed the same 256 binary sequences (e.g., AABAAABA) and classified each as generated by agents/non-agents or by nonrandom/random processes. We found a strong correlation between two judgments: sequences viewed as more agentive also tended to be judged as less random. In Experiment 2, another two groups were asked to produce sequences that others might appreciate as agentive or nonrandom. Participant-generated sequences in the two conditions had a substantial overlap, indicating common guiding principles of agency and nonrandomness generation. Taken together, the present studies provide evidence for a shared cognitive basis of agency detection and subjective randomness.

[1]  J. Barrett.  Exploring the natural foundations of religion , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[2]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society , 2015 .

[3]  W. Friedman.  The development of an intuitive understanding of entropy. , 2001, Child development.

[4]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  Probability, algorithmic complexity, and subjective randomness , 2003 .

[5]  Thomas L. Griffiths,et al.  From Algorithmic to Subjective Randomness , 2003, NIPS.

[6]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  Secret Agents , 2005, Psychological science.

[7]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  From mere coincidences to meaningful discoveries , 2007, Cognition.

[8]  Patrice D. Tremoulet,et al.  The Attribution of Mental Architecture from Motion : Towards a Computational Theory , 2008 .

[9]  George E. Newman,et al.  Early understandings of the link between agents and order , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[10]  Adam N. Sanborn,et al.  Uncovering mental representations with Markov chain Monte Carlo , 2010, Cognitive Psychology.

[11]  H. Wellman,et al.  Young Children Use Statistical Sampling to Infer the Preferences of Other People , 2010, Psychological science.

[12]  Ethan L. Schreiber,et al.  Subjective randomness and natural scene statistics , 2010, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[13]  Lili Ma,et al.  Preverbal infants infer intentional agents from the perception of regularity. , 2013, Developmental psychology.

[14]  Fei Xu,et al.  Infants' Early Understanding of Coincidences , 2013, CogSci.

[15]  Cristine H. Legare,et al.  Priming randomness increases the evaluation of ritual efficacy , 2013, CogSci.

[16]  T. Griffiths,et al.  Why are people bad at detecting randomness? A statistical argument. , 2013, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[17]  S. Dieguez,et al.  Nothing Happens by Accident, or Does It? A Low Prior for Randomness Does Not Explain Belief in Conspiracy Theories , 2015, Psychological science.

[18]  George E. Newman,et al.  Order, Order Everywhere, and Only an Agent to Think: The Cognitive Compulsion to Infer Intentional Agents , 2015 .

[19]  Laura Schulz,et al.  The Invisible Hand: Toddlers Connect Probabilistic Events With Agentive Causes , 2016, Cogn. Sci..

[20]  R. Baillargeon,et al.  Psychological Reasoning in Infancy. , 2016, Annual review of psychology.

[21]  Luca Konig,et al.  The Blind Watchmaker Why The Evidence Of Evolution Reveals A Universe Without Design , 2016 .

[22]  Andrea Gawrylewski.  Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories about the World Are So Often Wrong. , 2017 .