Although a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and we formally model the scenarios under which individuals may overestimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence. We found that strong prior belief, underreporting of negative evidence, and misinferring belief from behavior can all contribute to biased and inaccurate beliefs about the effectiveness of epistemic technologies. We finally suggest how scientific epistemology, as it emerged in Western societies over the past few centuries, has influenced the importance and cultural centrality of divination practices.

尽管人类学和比较宗教方面的大量文献探索了不同社会中的占卜并回归历史，但很少有研究将较早的民族志和历史工作与最近对人类学习、文化传播和认知科学的见解相结合。在这里，我们提供的证据表明，占卜实践通常最好被视为一种认知技术，并且我们正式模拟了个人可能高估占卜功效的情景，这些情景有助于其文化无所不在和历史持久性。我们发现，强烈的先验信念、负面证据的漏报以及从行为中错误推断信念都可能导致对认知技术有效性的偏见和不准确信念。我们最终建议如何科学认识论，