Why we blame victims, accuse witches,

invent taboos and invoke spirits:

A model of strategic responses to misfortune

Pascal Boyer

forthcoming, 2021, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Draft version

Abstract. Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most
human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods,
ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, karma, and the violation of specific rules or “taboos”. In modern
large-scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, e.g., accidents and
assault. These responses may seem both disparate and puzzling, in the sense that the
proposed accounts of untoward events provide no valuable information about their causes or
the best way to prevent them. However, these responses make sense if we see them in an
evolutionary context, where accidents, assault and illness were common occurrences, the
only palliative being social support to victims. This would create a context in which all
members of a group may be a) required to offer support, b) willing to offer such support to
maintain a reputation as cooperators, and c) desirous to limit that support because of its cost.
In this context, recurrent explanations of misfortune would constitute strategic attempts to
create and broadcast a specific description of the situation that concentrates responsibility
and potential costs on a few individuals. This strategic model accounts for otherwise puzzling
features of explanations based on mystical harm (ancestors, witchcraft, etc.), as well as the
tendency to denigrate victims, and offers new predictions about those cultural phenomena.

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Why we blame victims, accuse witches,
invent taboos and invoke spirits:
A model of strategic responses to misfortune

Why would people blame the victims of misfortune? Why would they think that
gods or spirits or witches are involved in making people sick? Here I propose a
general model for culturally widespread interpretations and explanations of
misfortune, e.g., accidents, illness, failures, etc. People often see such events as the
work of gods, spirits, witches, as the consequence of religious violations, or,
generally without much evidence, try to claim that victims “had it coming” and
somehow provoked their own problems. I argue that these responses, while they do
not help humans avoid or palliate misfortune, do make sense in an evolutionary
perspective as parts of various strategies to enhance fitness through social
interaction.

1. Misfortune: A puzzle and a program

1.1. Common responses to misfortune

Consider the following culturally widespread responses to misfortune.
Spirits and gods are involved. People attribute misfortune to imagined agents,
such as gods, ancestors, spirits, ghosts, demons, etc., which often implies that some
propitiation is required.
Witches are responsible.1 The machinations of particular individuals (usually
members of the group) explain illness, accidents, failures, etc. Witchcraft beliefs are
common the world over in small-scale or agrarian communities.
Karma explains why bad things happen. Here untoward events are the
consequence of past deeds from the victim’s soul, in a previous incarnation.
The victim must have breached a prohibition or “taboo”2. People assume for
instance that committing incest would cause the earth to shake or rivers to flow
backwards. In many places, they readily interpret actual misfortune as the
consequence of some violation of social norms.
The victim is the person to blame. We know from experience that people often
blame the victims of various kinds of misfortune, e.g., assault or accident. They for
instance state that the victim somehow “had it coming”, to use a common phrase,
because they were reckless, did not take sufficient precautions, provoked someone
to attack them, etc. A widespread reaction to the AIDS epidemic was to blame
victims. homosexuals in particular (Crandall, Glor, & Britt, 1997). More
dramatically, many people in Europe considered (and still consider) Jews at least
partly to blame for the Holocaust, e.g., because their behavior before or during the

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war somehow forced the Nazis into persecuting them (C. J. Dean, 2017; Weiss-
Wendt, 2008).
Note that such cultural assumptions do not always cover all cases of negative
events. People produce such accounts for events that seem to require some specific
explanations. Although many anthropologists have noticed that fact, few have
elaborated on what makes some events stand out as special. Favret-Saada for
instance notes that only recurrent, serious problems are seen as special (Favret-
Saada, 1980). By contrast, in other places any illness or accident triggers a search
for mystical explanations (Fortune, 1932). Also, in many places other people’s
success counts as one’s own misfortune, and therefore requires a special
explanation.
These explanations of misfortune are common in different cultures – some are
common in most cultures. And all of these are, from the standpoint of evolutionary
psychology, deeply puzzling.

1.2. Why common responses are puzzling

The puzzle starts from the assumption that human cognition consists of a set of
adaptations, that is, capacities and dispositions that, on average, contributed to
fitness gains over evolutionary times (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). As humans are
bound to experience illness, accidents, assaults, etc., we would expect an adapted
mind to focus on aspects of the world that are pertinent to reducing the occurrence
or consequences of such misfortune. That is the case in many respects, as dedicated
neuro-cognitive systems govern our reactions to direct and potential threats. 3 But
the widespread notions we describe here are clearly irrelevant to countering or
avoiding threats, in the sense of representing and reacting to invariances across
situations. Claiming that sickness is caused by witches does not provide useable
information about illness.
Even more puzzling, many interpretations of misfortune focus on aspects of the
situation that seem of little value for avoiding or palliating such events. Evans-
Pritchard famously documented this focus in his ethnographic study of the Zande
people of Sudan. In one episode described by Evans-Pritchard, people explain that a
granary collapsed, hurting people who were sitting in its shade, because it was
infested by termites. But they also want an answer to the question, why it collapsed
precisely when particular people were sitting underneath (Evans-Pritchard, 1937,
p. 69). More generally, a common reaction to misfortune is to ask, Why me? Why
now? But answers to these questions do not by themselves result in better
predictions of subsequent occurrence or to the means to remedy them.

1.3. Proposal for a strategic model

The challenge, then, is to account for particular forms of response to misfortune.
Naturally, human beings respond to negative events in many diverse ways,
depending on personal circumstances and motivations. What is of interest here are
those explanations that become “cultural”, that is, are represented in roughly

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similar ways in individual minds within a particular social group or community.
For instance, explanations of illness may take many forms, but in some groups one
assumes that some individual’s jealousy or sorcery count among the plausible
explanations – and our task is to explain why such expectations would seem
plausible, and why people would be motivated to propagate them within their social
environment. As other anthropologists in the study of cultural evolution, we assume
that what we observe as cultural representations and practices are variants of
cultural traits found in roughly similar forms in a particular place or group,
because they have resisted change and distortion through innumerable processes of
acquisition, storage, inference, and communication (Boyd & Richerson, 1985;
Claidière, Scott-Phillips, & Sperber, 2014; Sperber, 1996).
Here I propose that recurrent themes in culturally widespread explanations of
misfortune result from a specific set of dispositions and preferences, whereby
humans manage the consequences of misfortune in their social environment.
Specifically, I argue that:
 In technologically simple circumstances, typical of the environments in
which humans evolved, the most important resource the victims of
accidents and illness would need was (and still is) social support, that is,
other people’s continued willingness to help those who cannot contribute
their share of production and group defense.
 We know that evolved mental systems include motivations both to provide
offer for others and seek such support when necessary, but also to avoid
being exploited by others.
 We also know that a crucial human motivation is a concern for one’s
reputation, in particular, for being seen as a valuable cooperative partner in
one’s community.
 These motivations lead people to create or endorse particular accounts of
misfortune, and to try to turn these accounts into the received opinion in
their community.
 This explains the cultural recurrence of specific ways of explaining and
reacting to instances of misfortune.

2. Evolutionary background: misfortune and social support

2.1. What was the impact of illness and injury in ancestral

conditions?
One aspect of prehistoric conditions that may not be salient to modern humans
is the high incidence of illness and injury, as documented in the archaeological and
ethnographic records, for instance the high incidence of congenital diseases,
infections and accidents – see a general survey in (Grauer, 2011; Weston, 2011).
Accidents too were frequent, accounting for many cases of fractures in the skeletal
record (Roberts & Manchester, 2005, p. 46). Some varieties of foraging require

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strenuous effort, the effects of which combine with illness (e.g., arthritis,
spondylosis, cancer) to damage bone structure 4. Finally, interpersonal and inter-
group violence also account for a good proportion of fractures (Judd & Redfern,
2011).5
The comparative study of contemporary foragers (Kelly, 1995), despite obvious
problems of inference (Leacock & Lee, 1982), provides reliable indicators of the
kinds of dangers associated with the specific ecological conditions under which
ancient populations evolved. Ethnographic studies illustrate the kinds of hazards
faced by foragers in tropical environments – the most consequential being
congenital conditions, infectious disease, predation, accidents, and attacks from
conspecifics. For example, in Sugiyama’s detailed survey of a sample of Shiwiar
forager-horticulturalists of Ecuador, there are traces of puncture wounds and
lacerations in 33% of surveyed individuals, current or recent infections in 21%, and
fractured bones in 2% (Sugiyama, 2004b, p. 387). 6
These and similar surveys from other regions support Hill et al.’s conclusion
that the foraging lifestyle comes with a high risk of accidents and illness, often
compounded by the pressure of nomadism as people need to move on regardless of
their condition (Hill et al., 2007). In many places, the dangers of the foraging
lifestyle also include the costs of inter-group conflict.7 The impact of these
circumstances is not trivial. For example, a snake bite can incapacitate individuals
and then diminish their physical capacities for a year (Sugiyama, 2004b, p. 385).
All this would suggest that a notable proportion of individuals in ancestral
conditions would, at some time in their lifetimes, fall sick (parasites, bacterial
infections, internal conditions) or be injured (accidents, individual or collective
violence). In the same way as the immune system bears traces of our struggle with
pathogens (Hempel, 2011), some of these recurrent events would leave traces on our
evolved capacities, which would explain some of our psychological dispositions in
the treatment of misfortune.

2.2. Would sick and injured individuals receive support?

Given that many ancestral individuals would be sick or injured, what do we
know about the amount of support they received? In the ecological and technical
conditions of ancestral communities, very little could be done to remedy infections
or injuries, despite (often considerable) knowledge of plants and their curative
effects, as well as some techniques like setting fractures.
As a consequence, the main resource would have been social support. This could
take the form of e.g., providing food for an individual who could not contribute to its
production, or protecting them from predators or enemies. To what extent were
those forms of help part of our ancestral environment?
From prehistory, we only have very fragmentary, and necessarily indirect
information (Ortner, 2003). One crucial piece of evidence is that many individuals
seem to have survived disease and injury, including fractures that would have left
them disabled, in some cases severely. An extreme example is that of a gravely

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disabled individual, whose skeleton was part of the Gran Quivira site (about
1600CE), and whose remains suggest a debilitating chronic arthritis that would
have made walking difficult or impossible from the teenage years, leading to almost
complete paralysis in the following years. Yet that man survived for several
decades, and could not have done so without very heavy support from able group
members (Hawkey, 1998).8 Social support for weaker individuals might have
occurred even earlier. The Neanderthal Shanidar 1 skeleton shows evidence of
right-arm paralysis, that would have considerably reduced hunting and protection
abilities, and therefore might have required help (Trinkaus, 2014). More generally,
the record in many sites shows severe fractures with signs of healing and
subsequent aging (Roberts & Manchester, 2005, p. 99). There seems to have been at
least enough support, such that people could survive vicissitudes that resulted in a
diminished contribution to production.9
The archaeological record can tell us that (at least some) victims of misfortune
received some social support, but it cannot tell us how frequent that was, or who
provided help. We can complement this archaeological evidence with evidence from
modern foragers. Diseased or weakened individuals are frequently taken care of,
even though their contribution to food production, nurturing or group defense is
clearly diminished. In Sugiyama’s Shiwiar survey for instance, many individuals
received help. Many children are born of parents who had fractures or other insults
before the birth. More generally, people die long after insults or illnesses that
severely affect their contribution to production (Sugiyama, 2004a, p. 394).

3. Social support. Ultimate and proximate aspects

3.1. Ultimate aspects

As misfortune and social support were both recurrent features of our prehistoric
conditions, it makes sense to see them as part of the evolutionary environment of
our species. This raises the question, of the impact of these factors on human
evolved motivations and capacities.
Trade-offs inevitably occur in allocating social help. First, most obvious, helping
a victim comes at a cost for the benefactor, including both the direct cost of, e.g.,
food or protection provided, and the opportunity cost of not engaging in other
fitness-enhancing behaviors. Second, diseased or wounded individuals contribute
less to production and collective action, so they are in that respect less valuable
exchange partners. Third, a severely sick or injured individual may have little
chance of survival, which makes that person a poor candidate for help, if help is
based solely on the expectation of direct future reciprocation. Fourth, social support
is by necessity a rival good – the more one victim of misfortune receives, the less is
available for others.
What set of strategies would best satisfy these constraints? The fact that social
support for victims is widespread in human societies would suggest that, under

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specific circumstances, some fitness benefits offset the various costs of social
support. Individuals may help, not in the expectation of reciprocation, but as a way
of communicating to third parties their willingness to be generous cooperators. In
this sense, help offered to non-kin would overcome the “Banker’s Paradox” in
cooperation, the fact that it is when we need help most that we appear least likely
to pay it back (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). As Sugiyama points out, a motivation to
help those in need makes sense in a species where cooperation is based on
reputation (Sugiyama & Sugiyama, 2003), see also (Gintis, 2000). This could occur
without direct reciprocation. If A did help B unconditionally in times of need, then
C cannot deny A help without losing reputation, being the person who does not
cooperate with a generous cooperator. A disposition to help those in direst need, like
many other deontic motivations, would seem to be the outcome of an evolutionary
context of cooperation based on repeated interactions, partner-choice, and
reputation (Baumard, André, & Sperber, 2013; Delton, Krasnow, Cosmides, &
Tooby, 2011).
This ultimate factor would predict that support may come from a broad range of
individuals beyond the victim’s kin, as the reputation benefits are greater if helper
and beneficiary are not genetically related. This would suggest that, in a small
group of personally known individuals, typical of human ancestral conditions, any
member of the group might be a potential helper, and thereby benefit from an
enhanced reputation. Here we use the term reputation, as in formal models of
cooperation, to denote any information that people may have, concerning an
individual’s previous cooperative (or non-cooperative) interactions (Sylwester &
Roberts, 2010). To the extent that human cooperation relies on choosing the best
(that is, fairest, most cooperative) partners available in one’s social environment,
monitoring other people’s reputation, and managing one’s own, are crucial to
mutually beneficial interactions (Sperber & Baumard, 2012). That is all the more so
in the small-scale communities typical of much of human evolution (Kelly, 1995). In
such groups, most individuals have information about most interactions, so that
people’s behavior is strongly constrained by reputation effects. That is salient for
instance in sharing, as documented by the many instances in which people
reluctantly share the fruits of their labor, for fear of being seen as selfish (Bliege
Bird & Power, 2015; Gurven, 2004; Kaplan & Gurven, 2005).
There are of course clear limits to the fitness advantages of such behaviors.
Simply put, it is probably not a good strategy to offer help to all those who may
seem to need it. Social support is a rivalrous good. That is, helping one individual
entails not being able to help others, including at a later time. Also, not all
recipients of help may be in equal need. Finally, some may not even deserve help.
So we should expect a motivation to help to be sensitive to specific cues concerning
the victim and their circumstances.

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3.2. Supply of social support: Proximate capacities and motivations
Given these ultimate factors, we could expect that specific proximate
mechanisms motivate the provision or withdrawal of social support. Here is a
minimal description of the relevant capacities and motivations:
A motivation to recruit support. Humans engage in many behaviors that elicit
support from others, from infants crying (Reijneveld, van der Wal, Brugman, Sing,
& Verloove-Vanhorick, 2004) to adults communicating about their plight, and
specifically, trying to reactivate or reinforce previously existing social bonds, see
e.g., (Gourash, 1978). The motivation is so familiar to us that it is generally taken
for granted, and it may seem strange to even mention it.
A motivation to offer support. Humans engage in generous behaviors beyond kin
selection (extending favors to genetically related individuals) and reciprocal
altruism (extending favors to unrelated individuals that will reciprocate with a high
probability). The literature on moral psychology and cooperation is replete with
illustrations of a general human tendency to offer help that can enhance the
welfare of others. Even very young children for instance spontaneously try to help
adults who apparently cannot solve a task (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006).
A motivation to avoid exploitation. Humans have a strong aversion to free-riding
and exploitation. The moral psychology and evolutionary psychology literatures
show that specific computations detect and react to such situations. For instance,
people are selectively attentive to the fact that exchange partners may be deriving
benefits from interaction without paying costs (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). A large
literature shows that humans identify and try to avoid cooperation partners that
offer unfair contributions – see summary in (Baumard, 2011).10

4. Predicted dynamics of communication and reputation

4.1. The strategic background

Given a specific case of misfortune, the capacities and dispositions described
here would create a context of interaction with the following properties:
[1] Everyone is a potential contributor. That is, most members of the group could
in principle be “on the hook” when some misfortune strikes any other member. To
the extent that people expect some generous behavior in cases of misfortune, they
(at least potentially) expect a contribution from everybody else – so that the
misfortune of one is a concern for all.
[2] People are motivated to limit their contribution. Because there is a cost to
offering support, we should expect individuals to intuitively engage in courses of
action that reduce that cost, or make it possible to deny support, or constrain others
to share the burden.
[3] People compute the various causal factors involved in misfortune. They do
not just represent the situation, the costs for the victim and the potential need for

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help, but also evaluate the chain of causes, including the victim’s own behavior,
that led to the particular situation.
[4] People are attentive to what others in their group say, concerning a
particular case. That is, they can evaluate what interpretations of the case are
transmitted, whether they seem plausible, whether they will seem plausible to
others, and to what extent the carry consequences, e.g., for the need to help the
victim.
This last point requires a more detailed exposition, as the conditions of
communication are crucial to understanding various ways of interpreting
misfortune.

4.2. Communication and the manufacture of common knowledge

In small-scale communities, typical of most of human evolutionary
environments, people constantly exchange information about salient events, and
cases of misfortune are of course preeminent in such conversations. Also, as
frequently noted in the anthropological literature, people in such communities place
a high value on the establishment of a consensus, as regards important matters.
Most people intuitively value the coordination advantages of having an agreed
interpretation of salient events.
Given this, both victims and observers have an interest, not just in acting in
specific ways, but also in promoting a particular description of the situation, and
turning that description into the commonly accepted version, that is, an explicitly
consensual opinion, consisting not just in people’s average opinion, but in the fact
that most people assume that most others share that opinion (Brennan & Pettit,
2004; Sperber & Baumard, 2012, p. 510).11
In situations of misfortune, then, people may be strongly motivated to “push” a
particular account of what happened, and strive to get others to accept it as
common knowledge. If it is (overtly) accepted by all that So-and-so is ill because the
ancestors are angry, this has consequences for the speaker, for So-and-so, and for
other third-parties. In particular, it may influence the way people construe So-and-
so’s responsibility in what happened. It may influence their opinions on whether
the victim should engage in restorative measures to propitiate the ancestors, to
what extent various individuals would bear the costs of such rituals, and so forth.
Such considerations would motivate people to endorse and broadcast particular
versions of events. In some cases, victims themselves may participate in this
elaboration of a consensual explanation, by describing themselves as victims of
some individual’s sorcery, for instance, and thereby producing an explanation that
is advantageous to most others in the group. (Note, however, that in most cases of
witchcraft accusations reported in the literature, third-parties are the main
proposers and defenders of specific accusations).

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4.3. Predictions: How to represent misfortune in small-scale societies
These capacities and preferences should have an influence on people’s discourse.
Here are two predictions concerning preferred representations of misfortune.

Prediction 1: Specificity. Discourse about misfortune will focus on particulars

That is to say, statements about misfortune will be perceived as all the more
relevant, as they mention facts that uniquely apply to the situation considered,
rather than to the situation as an instance of a class. In practice, this means that
most discourse about misfortune would be about particulars, e.g., about the fact
that So-and-so’s sorcery made this individual sick, rather than about the general
process of sorcery.
This would be a straightforward consequence of a motivation for expressing
discourse relevant to support. As mentioned above, people who want to “push” a
particular version of what occurred, may be (in part) motivated by the fact that
such a description would affect the allocation of help and support. In particular, one
motivation is to a) maintain one’s reputation as a cooperator, whilst b) reducing
potential demands on one’s support. That can be done by adopting a description of
the situation, that makes even a good cooperator justified in limiting or denying
their help in that particular case, therefore without leading others to conclude that
one is in fact generally selfish. This constraint would make details of particular
situations highly relevant to all third-parties, whilst generic statements about
misfortune would be mostly irrelevant.

Prediction 2: Focalization. Discourse will asymmetrically allocate responsibility.

A major prediction from this model is that the attribution of responsibility
should be asymmetrical, between groups and individuals. That is to say, since the
motivation between some explanations is to concentrate responsibility rather than
diffuse it, we expect to find that in many cases people explain misfortune by the
actions of one or a few individuals, and that obtains even when the misfortune
affects many people. The incentives for focalizing responsibility on a single person
(or a small group) are shared by many individuals not targeted, and therefore left
off the hook, as it were. People would for instance explain an individual illness by
an individual’s witchery or taboo-violation, but they may also explain a collective
problem like bad crops or epitomize in terms of one person who offended a god,
broke some rule or engaged in witchcraft. The model would predict that we do not
find the opposite case, that is, we do not observe cases where people would find it
compelling to explain some specific misfortune, affecting an individual, in terms of
collective responsibility, e.g., stating that this particular person got sick because we
are not pious enough as a group, or because we have failed to perform rituals as a
community.

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5. Cultural interpretations and their strategic implications
What follows are examples of common strategies for the explanation and
interpretation of misfortune, culled from the anthropological record. This is
intended as an illustration rather than a thorough empirical examination of the
cross-cultural evidence, see (Boyer, under review) for some elements of such a
study. Here I focus on the most culturally widespread features, which is why I for
instance do not mention karma-based accounts.12

5.1. Involving spirits, gods or ancestors

The most widespread explanation of misfortune focuses on the intervention of
superhuman agents (gods, spirits, ancestors, etc.) in the lives of ordinary humans.
This is true of the most diverse cultures. The Tallensi of Ghana for instance
consider most accidents or illness as punishment by the ancestors, or rather, an
attempt on the ancestors’ part to “correct” people’s ways (Fortes, 1987, pp. 78ff.,
295ff.). In a very different environment, the Nuaulu of Eastern Indonesia make
very similar statements (Ellen, 1993, p. 92). In Greek popular religion the various
gods’ interventions would explain most circumstances of life and be required to
palliate all negative outcomes, see e.g., (Burkert, 1985, pp. 55ff., 264ff.).
The theme is so common that it would be surprising to find a society where
people imagine spirits or gods but do not associate them with misfortune. In fact,
this is one of these situations where we can learn a lot from the dog that did not
bark, as in the famous Sherlock Holmes story (Doyle, 1903). Even though people’s
descriptions of superhuman agents can vary a lot, we do not find any community
where no such agents are involved in people’s misfortune. Indeed, in those religious
traditions whose doctrine describes the god or gods as entirely unconcerned with
humans, people either supplement those with other, more concerned deities, or
simply ignore the doctrine, a well-known phenomenon described as “theological
incorrectness” (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Slone, 2004).
Why is the association of misfortune and superhuman agents so compelling? It
may be of help to describe how people describe that association. In principle, one
could construe it in very general terms, describing the gods or spirits as the distant
cause of all misfortune, in the same way as we think of temperature, pressure,
evaporation as what generally causes the weather. And people in many places
would indeed agree that gods or ancestors generally bring about good and bad
fortune. But in most communities, they do not stop there. Consider for instance
shamanistic practices. A specialist is said to have specific skills or a particular
substance that makes him or her specially capable of interacting with spirits, and
engaging in the kind of bargaining that may result in healing or restoration of the
victim’s good fortune. Such rituals are invariably directed at a particular case of
misfortune, whose ultimate causes remain inscrutable (Singh, 2018, p. 4). The
outcome is a new description of the situation, one that emphasizes how the
particular individual was targeted by some spirits or other such agents.

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 Consistent with Prediction 1 above, such procedures always focus on the
particulars of the case. Neither shamans nor diviners aim to provide generic
information about the causes of illness or accidents, and their clients are not
seeking such information. What matters are the unique features of the situation,
and the involvement of the gods or spirits is also described in terms of these
particulars.
In agreement with prediction [2], seeing misfortune as caused by spirits and
ancestors suggests that responsibility for the unfortunate state of affairs lies in a
limited number of persons, typically in one individual. Adopting such explanations
implies that responsibility is highly concentrated instead of being seen as shared by
the community.
This is another case of a dog that did not bark. When they handle specific
misfortune, most religious practices construe it as connected to something the
victim did or failed to do, not the community. When a group is seen as responsible,
it is for group-level problems, when for instance a community’s defeat is seen as
collective punishment for collective neglect of the ancestors (Keesing, 1982). But we
do not observe cases in which an individual’s bad fortune is explained by a whole
community’s actions, without considering the victim’s own behavior. Note that this
way of seeing misfortune would be entirely compatible with religious concepts, e.g.,
of superhuman agents that can inflict illness through unexplained means.
This interesting asymmetry (individual faults may cause collective problems,
but collective faults are usually not seen as the cause of individual misfortune, in
religious terms), makes more sense if we consider that a central motivation is to
focalize responsibility, that is, to create or endorse descriptions of the situation in
which most third-parties can be considered off-the-hook, so to speak, and therefore
less clearly accountable for help or palliation.

5.2. Witchcraft accusations

Why would people see misfortune as caused by someone’s witchery?
Anthropological accounts oscillate between a “scapegoating” interpretation,
whereby people accuse the most vulnerable or marginalized individuals of
witchcraft, as there is not much cost in ganging up on them, see e.g., (Gluckman,
1955; La Fontaine, 1998); and a social leveling account, whereby people accuse the
overly successful of being witches, e.g., (Kluckhohn, 1944). In either case, it remains
to explain the dynamics of mobilization, that is, why people would endorse
accusations against a witch.
It helps to see witchcraft accusations as a form of stigmatization, providing a
coordination point for coalitional alignment against a particular individual
(Kurzban & Leary, 2001). People who have some interest in inflicting harm on a
particular individual may use witchcraft accusations rather than a direct attack,
because the accusation makes it possible to recruit allies against the target, whilst
maintaining one’s own reputation. Also, once an accusation targets an individual,
previously unconcerned or neutral third-parties may have a strong incentive to

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endorse it rather than defend the target, an incentive that of course becomes
stronger as more people agree with the accusation. This is certainly a crucial aspect
of the dynamic that motivates people’s willingness to endorse specific accusations.
One of the effects of such mobilization is that, if enough people support the
accusation, there is now an accepted description of a case of misfortune, in which
the responsibility for what happened to the victim is circumscribed to one
particular individual. Potential restorative measures are also concentrated on the
person of the witch and immediate kin. In most cases of witchcraft in small-scale
societies, the designated witch and family have to perform specific rituals, as well
as compensate the victim in some cases. So we may see witchcraft accusations as
attempts to create a consensus on the fact that responsibility is limited and
therefore the potential legitimate costs of reparation should also be limited to an
individual or the close kin.
Note that explaining accident or illness by witchcraft may have the benefit of
providing one convenient target for responsibility, but it is also potentially very
costly. It means that one individual is singled out as the ultimate anti-cooperator, a
reputation cost that occasionally backfires on the accusers and in any case makes it
more difficult to extract cooperation gains from the presumed witch. This might
explain why people are highly motivated to make witchcraft cases a matter of
consensus. In most small-scale communities with witchcraft beliefs and witchcraft
accusations, a complex process leads from the initial observation, that some case of
misfortune requires an explanation, to public accusations, confession and
restorative justice.

5.3. Rule violation

The emphasis on rule violation as a cause of illness or accidents varies a lot
between cultures. Compare for instance the Dorze case with a large catalogue of
highly specific prohibitions whose violation explains misfortune (Sperber, 1999, p.
299) with Dobu in Melanesia, where witchcraft is seen as a constant threat
(Fortune, 1932).
In many cases the idea of rule violation is combined with the involvement of
supernatural agents. For instance, the Nuaulu of Indonesia construe most
misfortune, from poor crops to failure to illness, as caused by some violation of
customary norms that offended the ancestors (Ellen, 1993, p. 92ff.), describing the
connection in the same terms as the Yoruba (Afe, 2013, p. 106), the Tallensi in
Ghana (Fortes, 1987, p. 126), the Iban of Borneo (Wadley, 1999, p. 595) and people
in Himachal Pradesh (Sharma, 1973, p. 353).
In other places, people find the connection between violation and disaster
intuitively compelling, without having to specify how agents are involved. That
seems to be the case when Malagasy people connect, for instance, the occurrence of
incest and natural disasters (Astuti & Bloch, 2015, p. 2), when Dorze people see
rule violation as a direct cause of personal misfortune (Sperber, 1999), or when
Nubian Muslims state that specific behaviors at the beginning of a lunar month will

13
bring about bad outcomes, although no-one bothers to specify by what process
(Kennedy, 1967, p. 688).
An important point here is that, in many cases, people are not aware of what
prescriptions they may have violated. For instance, Dorze people think there are
hundreds of highly specific prohibitions that they do not know, which is why they
must defer to diviners (Sperber, 1999, p. 299). It is always possible for anyone to
have unwittingly breached some specific prohibition. Indeed, as Astuti and Bloch
point out, in many cultures and especially in Madagascar, this association between
rule violation and consequent responsibility is not affected by intentionality. People
represent that the victim was specially involved in bringing about the particular
problem, without having to assume that they willed it (Astuti & Bloch, 2015, p. 2).
The notion of misfortune caused by rule violation, just like that of superhuman
agents’ involvement, locates the cause of bad outcomes in the victim him or herself,
in other words, describes misfortune in terms of processes that are [1] specific to the
particular situation at hand and [2] focalize responsibility, as predicted by the
model proposed here.

6. A modern account: Victims as blameworthy

So far, I have described the interpretation of misfortune in small-scale societies
which approximate some features of ancestral communities, e.g., the size of groups,
the fact that social support is a crucial aspect of care in the absence of biomedical
solutions, the fact that most ecologies only support very modest levels of wealth
accumulation, and so forth. So it makes sense to ask whether those mechanisms
would still apply in modern, mass societies. Given that most of the mechanisms
described here have to do with responsibility, and in many cases end up locating
that responsibility in the victim’s person, it may be relevant to consider the
widespread phenomenon, whereby people tend to blame or derogate victims of
misfortune, mostly by emphasizing either contribution to their own problems.

6.1. Experimental evidence and social psychology explanations

Although the phenomenon itself is familiar from everyday interaction, most of
the scientific evidence comes from experimental protocols. In the first studies that
documented this striking reaction, participants observed a confederate of the
experimenters’ being ostensibly shocked with electrodes as a “negative reward” for
their wrong test answers. Subjects tended to devaluate the victims, relative to
control conditions, more so if they were unable to help (Lerner & Simmons, 1966),
and if they might be considered responsible (Cialdini, Kenrick, & Hoerig, 1976).
Further studies confirmed that people tend to derogate victims of misfortune,
especially by ascribing to them some responsibility in what occurred (Strömwall,
Alfredsson, & Landström, 2013), see survey in (Hafer & Bègue, 2005).
Proposed explanations of this phenomenon have focused on proximate
psychological mechanisms. Lerner originally proposed that people generally hold a

14
“belief in a just world” (BJW) whereby bad things somehow happen to bad people.
As cases of misfortune in many cases seem to clash with that assumption, people
might preserve their belief by assuming that the victim is not such a good person
after all (Lerner, 1965, 1980). There is however no independent justification for this
hypothesis. Lerner simply stated that people must have that belief, without which
they would find life intolerable (Lerner, 1980). 13 After Lerner, a large experimental
literature confirms the correlation between the belief in a just world, measured
through normed instruments, on the one hand, and victim blame on the other
(Furnham, 2003; Rubin & Peplau, 1975). 14 Remarkably, some of these empirical
studies show a connection between BJW on the one hand, and cooperation (or
rather, unwillingness to cooperate) on the other, an association that is compatible
with the model proposed here (Wenzel, Schindler, & Reinhard, 2017). People may
consider the world a just place for others (general BJW), though not for themselves
(personal BJW), a combination of beliefs that contributes to excuse one’s motivation
to exploit others (Sutton & Winnard, 2007).
Research on victim-derogation suffered from common limitations of early social
psychology, notably the use of unrepresentative samples, as well as extreme
ethnocentrism – the few “cross-cultural” studies in the domain compare samples
from a few modern industrial countries. So the question remains, why people would
be motivated to derogate victims of misfortune in some circumstances.

6.2. Victim blame as a strategic move: Explanation and predictions

The strategic help model proposed here might provide a straightforward
explanation for the motivation to denigrate victims, or emphasize their own
responsibility. Here the reputation dynamics are fundamental. In this
interpretation, participants in these experiments have the intuition that they may
be seen as unwilling to help. One way to avoid that interpretation on one’s own
behavior would be to make it clear that the victim did not deserve support.
This causal process would explain some otherwise puzzling features of victim-
blame in the psychological literature.
[1] In many studies people derogate the victims, that is, describe them as
unworthy, in respects that have nothing to do with the misfortune (Correia et al.,
2012; Harvey, Callan, & Matthews, 2014). That is the case in Lerner’s original
studies for example, when students described a victim of electric shocks as unlikely
to be a popular student (Lerner, 1965). Note that in this case subjects derogate the
social qualities of the victim, her potential as a cooperator.
[2] The model would also explain why victim derogation is particularly intense
when the subject cannot offer any help (Cialdini et al., 1976; Lerner, 1965).
[3] A direct consequence of the model would be that people tend to derogate or
blame victims more, if they expect to have costs to pay. That is not directly tested in
the literature. But an indirect effect would be that victim-blame is more intense if
the situation seems to predict higher costs, if the damage to the victim is greater.
To some extent, that was supported by some experimental evidence (Walster, 1966),

15
although the results were complicated by the fact that experimental protocols do
not emphasize the connection between greater damage and higher costs (Shaver,
1970).
So the strategic model may shed some light, although in a speculative manner,
on a common phenomenon that is not really explained at all by standard social
psychology accounts. In places with modern technology, insurance policies and
social welfare, the impact of others’ misfortune is much diminished beyond kin and
friends. Still, people seem clearly motivated to focalize responsibility and costs. One
might see this reaction in experimental studies as an example of an evolutionary
mismatch, in which we engage in responses that would have been more appropriate
in ancestral environments (Li, van Vugt, & Colarelli, 2018).

6. Conclusion

6.1. Strategies for discourse

The strategic model aims to show how evolved dispositions and interests may
motivate certain ways of representing other people’s misfortune, especially when
the situation may create costs for third-parties. It may be helpful to dispel possible
misunderstandings of the model.
Strategies are not deliberate. The fact that a certain course of action is described
as strategic only means that it carries certain costs and benefits, given what other
people do. It is not meant to suggest that people deliberately plan to e.g., describe
an accident as witchcraft because that will get them off the hook, in terms of
responsibility and potential support.
Strategies are not always effective. I stipulated that an explanation may seem
attractive because, if accepted by all concerned, it would concentrate an originally
diffuse responsibility for the situation, and consequently its costs. That does not
entail that such strategic behaviors succeed. First, what seems convincing to one
may not seem so to others. In particular, victims and their supporters would have a
symmetrical motivation to publish a different account. The strategic model states
that people intuitively prefer a kind of discourse that might reduce potential costs,
not that they have an accurate picture of the consequences of what happens as a
result. That is why we observe attractive explanations of misfortune that do not
result in actual cost reductions. For instance, asserting that assault victims “had it
coming” does not in modern societies reduce the cost of solidarity, as none was
expected in the first place. Or, saying that someone got sick because a relative is a
witch, may not in the end reduce one’s costs. All the model is supposed to explain is
why some themes of discourse will seem plausible and compelling, not that they
will actually have the intended effects.

16
6.2. The missing explanation for misfortune explanations
Shared explanations of misfortune are common the world over – yet general
anthropological or psychological reflections on this phenomenon are surprisingly
rare. True, most anthropologists have commented on the fact that in many human
societies, almost all instances of salient misfortune require specific explanations.
And there is a vast and important literature on the social dynamics involved, from
which the present model takes inspiration, on witchcraft concepts and accusations
for instance (Douglas & Evans-Pritchard, 1970). Also relevant to the present model,
Fiske for instance described how shared explanations of misfortune, like other
cultural models, can serve as a coordinating device (Fiske, 2000).
In a more general manner, intellectualist anthropologists would assume that the
goal of people’s accounts of misfortune, as of other shared models, is to “explain,
predict and control” (Horton, 1967). But, as mentioned in introduction, that seems
to fly in the face of what we know about widespread representations of misfortune.
That is, a strict intellectualist approach would imply that people’s explanations of
misfortune are adopted by individuals, as a function of their explanatory power,
their capacity to account for past cases and in some measure to predict subsequent
ones. But, as documented here, many culturally widespread models, e.g., in terms of
the actions of witches, are silent on the ways in which the distant causes (a witch’;s
malevolence) effect some situation (a granary collapses on particular individuals),
and therefore is of no help in figuring out what might or might not happen next.
Psychologists have commented on people’s propensity to produce specific
explanations for salient negative events (Kovacek, 1996) and for using
counterfactuals as a way of formulating putative causes (Roese, 1997), as well as
the connection between explanations of mishap and just-world beliefs, as discussed
here (Hafer & Bègue, 2005). These are primarily descriptive models, that provide us
with indispensable information about mechanisms, but not about their origins.
In sum, this rich literature rarely if ever addresses the general question, Why
would human minds ever create explanations of misfortune? The phenomenon is
probably too human, that is, too familiar to all of us, to seem anything but self-
evident. In this domain as in others, an evolutionary perspective has the benefit of
making the familiar strange (Seabright, 2010, pp. 15-61), in this case, turning
common reactions to bad events into a puzzling psychological process. For that
reason, the present model is at this point largely speculative, as there is no
substantive history of explanations of explanations of misfortune.

6.3. This all seems exotic and unintuitive

The moralist La Rochefoucauld once remarked that “we all bear the misfortunes
of others with heroic fortitude” (Rochefoucauld, 1981[1665]). However witty, the
epigram is not in fact entirely true – especially when we perceive that we may be
compelled to help the victims. As documented here, assistance to sick, disabled and
injured individuals is a constant of humans societies from human prehistory. I

17
hypothesized that some evolved psychological mechanisms help us calibrate this
requirement against other contributors to our fitness.
It may be difficult for us to appreciate the point, because life in modern,
industrial mass societies obscures the relevance or even the existence of such
processes. Social welfare to some degree protects people from the effects of economic
adversity, while modern medicine clearly offers more efficient palliatives to illness
and accidents beyond social support. So the problems of a strategic allocation of
social support may seem quite alien to denizens of modern mass-societies. As a
consequence, the motivation to blame victims, or to find mystical causes for their
problems, may seem to be a strange quirk of human cognition, unrelated to our
evolved needs, capacities and preferences. But our minds evolved in communities
and economies in which insurance policies, social welfare and efficient medical
treatments were unknown. The costs created by other people’s tribulations were a
real challenge, and culturally widespread explanations of misfortune may well
reflect that reality.

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1 As in most of the anthropological literature, “witchcraft” here refers to situations in

which people think that a specific individual, who in many cases is a member of their group,
is responsible for someone else’s illness, failures, accidents, etc. See, e.g., (Bonhomme, 2012;
Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Favret-Saada, 1980; Fortune, 1932) for very different cases. This has
nothing to do with modern religious movements that identify themselves as witchcraft, see
e.g., (Luhrmann, 1989), and only party applies to the European witch-hunts (Thomas, 1997).

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 2 I will use the term rule-violation rather than “taboo” as the latter is highly misleading,

the common meaning of the term being a mish-mash of ethnographic detail (notably from
Polynesia), its anthropological interpretation, and a common term for all sorts of
interdictions.
3 Direct, imminent threats to fitness (e.g., attacks by predators or conspecifics) trigger

fast, appropriate flee-fight-freeze reactions (Blanchard, Griebel, Pobbe, & Blanchard, 2011).
Indirect potential danger, like cues to the presence of predators, situations of potential
contamination or contagion, loss of status or coalitional affiliation, trigger different but
equally fitness-enhancing evolved behaviors, both precautionary and palliative (Boyer &
Bergstrom, 2011).
4 This is documented in places as different as the Argentinian pampa (Chenque 1 site,

~1,000bp, (Luna, Aranda, Bosio, & Beron, 2008)) and prehistoric Japan in the Jomon culture,
~10,000 to 1,000bp (Suzuki, 1998)
5 For instance, in pre-ceramic Chinchorro culture (2000BCE, Chile) many skeletons bear

traces of attacks using darts and atlatl. A quarter of fractures are skull fractures, suggesting
assault rather than accidents (Standen & Arriaza, 2000). Among the Chinchorro culture
remains (2000 BCE), many victims of violent assault seem to have survived similar fractures
(Standen & Arriaza, 2000, p. 245).
6 A survey of the Yora in the Amazonian lowlands of Peru reports similar figures

(Sugiyama & Chacon, 2000). Among the foraging Hiwi of Venezuela and Colombia, Hill et al.
report a similarly high incidence of accidents and illness which results in a high mortality.
This is compounded by inter-group violence, as 36% of younger adult deaths occurred in
combat (Hill, Hurtado, & Walker, 2007, p. 444).
7 A comparative survey of pre-industrial societies from the HRAF ethnographic data-base

reveals a state of endemic warfare in a third of the sample, occasional inter-group violence in
three-quarters of the societies surveyed (Ember & Ember, 1997).
8 We can draw similar inferences from the case of an individual with a severe case of

neural tube insult (spina bifida cystita) in the Windover culture of Floria (about 7500bp),
with paralysis and atrophy of the lower limbs, or ever more severe handicaps, who would
have required sustained help for all of his 15 years (Dickel & Doran, 1989). Tilley et al
document the case of a severely disabled young man from Vietnam (about 4000BP),
paralyzed from the waist down (Tilley & Oxenham, 2011).
9 Some have argued that paleopathology does not provide evidence of compassion

(Dettwyler, 1991). Dettwyler points out that the disabled are not the only ones who are not
as productive as most members of a group, since children are unproductive too. Another
argument is that some disabled people can be productive in some ways (Dettwyler, 1991)
REF (p. 380). The arguments, however, are not really compelling. Children are non-
productive and that is precisely why we have evolved kin-selection motivations. The fact that
in modern contexts disabled individuals can be productive is irrelevant to the fact that in
nomadic foraging conditions, they certainly needed social support.
10 Note that the detection of free-riding is not the result of a simple “benefit without cost”

cue, but takes into account many other relevant aspects of the situation, including, most
importantly, the extent to which the partner’s actions are voluntary (Delton, Cosmides,
Guemo, Robertson, & Tooby, 2012).
11 The difference lies in the fact that people represent the distribution of other people’s

representations about the individual. In other words, opinion is the belief that p, e.g., that
“XYZ is a good/bad/etc. person”, while reputation is the meta-belief “most people believe that
p” (or, “it has been established that p”, or other possible variants).
12 The notion of karma is familiar to most people in South Asia, literate or not – see e.g.

(Keyes & Daniel, 1983) for a survey. However, karma is mostly invoked as a general, highly
abstract property of the world, but often left aside when people want to explain particular
cases of misfortune, see e.g., (Hiebert, 1983, p. 125) for Andhra Pradesh, (Daniel, 1983, p. 29)
for Tamils, (Sharma, 1973, p. 351) for Himachal Pradesh. See (M. Dean, 2013) for a general
survey.
13 Another social psychology interpretation posits a mechanism of “defensive attribution”

(Walster, 1966), whereby people faced with evidence of misfortune, try to maintain a belief
that they have control over their lives, and that such events could not possibly happen to
them. This could motivate them to distance themselves from victims, including through
derogation and attribution of responsibility (Burger, 1981).

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 14 However, it must be noted that the Just World Belief questionnaires themselves, see

e.g. (Lipkus, 1991), include items that are so semantically close to “accident victims should be
blamed” that the correlation is hardly surprising – subjects might be making explicit, in their
questionnaire responses, an assumption that guides their judgements in the experiment.
Also, the correlation does not appear in some domains, including in many cases of violent
crime, where it should be highest (Kleinke & Meyer, 1990).

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