The most common example is to
imagine yourself in a jungle. You hear a rustling in the leaves. Is it the wind or a tiger? Best not dally,
so let’s assume it is a tiger and choose the fight-or-flight or the stop-breathing-and-hope-it-walks-theother-
way response. That default sense that unknown forces might be caused by conscious, hungry
things is your sense of agency. It is why you find it so difficult to ignore suspicious bumps in the night.
Some part of you asks the other parts of you to investigate just in case there is an agent behind the
noise. The driving force behind investigations into a great deal of spooky, mysterious, weird, and
unexplained phenomena is the human instinct to assume there must be agency behind all manner of
creepy things, whether or not there is much evidence for it.
imagine yourself in a jungle. You hear a rustling in the leaves. Is it the wind or a tiger? Best not dally,
so let’s assume it is a tiger and choose the fight-or-flight or the stop-breathing-and-hope-it-walks-theother-
way response. That default sense that unknown forces might be caused by conscious, hungry
things is your sense of agency. It is why you find it so difficult to ignore suspicious bumps in the night.
Some part of you asks the other parts of you to investigate just in case there is an agent behind the
noise. The driving force behind investigations into a great deal of spooky, mysterious, weird, and
unexplained phenomena is the human instinct to assume there must be agency behind all manner of
creepy things, whether or not there is much evidence for it.
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