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Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
Title: Why the Ouija Board Seemed to Take on a Personality - The Effect of
Ritual Action on the Evaluation of Credibility of Divination
Category: pre-print
Length: 31
Keywords: ritual; divination; credibility

Abstract: How can divination be perceived to give credible information about
matters not otherwise available to normal human perception? While divination
exists in all known cultures in the world nothing much is know about how
divinatory information is represented. In this article it is investigated why
information acquired through divination comes to be regarded as credible. One
thing universally true of divination is that it employs ritual action to produce
information. It is argued that in ritual a displacement of intention takes place
which produces a deficiency in the intentional structure of the action. A hidden
or counter-intuitive agent is inferred in a repair process as the source of the
divinatory information. Previous research has shown that counter-intuitive
agents are not usually represented as having the same epistemic restrictions as
normal humans, which would account for why they could give credible information
about matters hidden to normal human perception. An experiment showed that
participants rated divinatory information obtained through ritual action as
significantly more credible than if it were obtained through normal intention
action. While it may be some other character of ritual action than the inference
of agency that produces the credibility of the information, it was investigated
whether divination was sensitive to differences in prestige in the god
associated with the divination technique. The results showed that participants
preferred the divination techniques associated with a high prestige god to that
of a low prestige god. This indicates that ritual action stimulates inference of
a counter-intuitive agent as the source of information, which would account for
the

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