| 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 (pages): | 31 |
| Keywords: | ritual; divination; credibility |
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| 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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| Remarks: | This is submitted for review to The Journal of Ritual Studies, December 2006 |
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| Email: | andersl @ hum.ku.dk |
| Bibliography: | |
| URL: | |
| Downloadable files: | ARC-9-Why the ouija board seemed to take on a personality.doc |
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| Submitted: | 20/12/2006 11:29:48 (DD / MM / YYYY) |
| Published: | 20/12/2006 12:52:58 (DD / MM / YYYY) |