Mysterious illnesses have supernatural and ritualistic cures: Evidence from 3,655 century-old Irish folk cures

Abstract

Why and when do people draw upon religious and supernatural solutions to problems? Cognitive scientists and anthropologists have proposed a range of answers, stressing religion and ritual’s capacity to alleviate anxiety, create a sense of order, or explain otherwise inexplicable events. Here, we leverage a unique dataset of 3,655 folk cures for 35 diseases, collected in 1937/8 from a mostly rural Irish sample born roughly between 1850 and 1925. Since the diseases vary in theory-relevant ways and the cures vary in the degree to which they include religious and supernatural elements, this dataset facilitates a unique test of these predictions in a premodern western population. In preregistered tests, we find that diseases judged by two doctors to have causes and mechanisms that would be unclear to the patients were more likely to have supernatural/religious treatments. Contra common predictions, severe and disabling diseases did not have more supernatural/religious cures and anxiety-provoking diseases did not have more ritualistic cures.