Fact-checked by Grok 2 weeks ago

Agent detection

Agent detection refers to the evolved cognitive predisposition in humans and other animals to attribute ambiguous or unexplained events to the intentional actions of a purposeful, intelligent agent, serving as a survival mechanism to identify potential threats such as predators or competitors.^[1]^[2] This hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), as conceptualized in evolutionary psychology, favors false positives over misses, enabling rapid responses to dangers in uncertain environments where overlooking an agent's presence could be fatal.^[3] Empirical studies, including biological motion perception tasks and auditory cue experiments, demonstrate heightened sensitivity to agent-like patterns under perceived threat, though this bias does not intensify uniformly across all conditions and can lead to erroneous attributions like superstitions or anthropomorphism.^[4]^[5] The mechanism's implications extend to cultural phenomena, including the origins of supernatural beliefs, as it predisposes individuals to infer hidden agents behind natural events, though debates persist on whether it specifically drives religious cognition or functions more broadly as a domain-general perceptual heuristic.^[1]^[3]

Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations

Definition and Core Mechanism

Agent detection refers to the cognitive process in humans and other animals whereby ambiguous or incomplete environmental stimuli are interpreted as evidence of intentional agency, such as the purposeful action of a predator, conspecific, or other goal-directed entity.^[2] This bias towards agency attribution arises from an evolved sensitivity to cues like unexpected motion, pattern irregularities, or goal-like behaviors, which could signal threats or opportunities in ancestral environments.^[1] The core mechanism underlying agent detection is the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), a concept introduced by cognitive scientist Justin Barrett in the early 2000s to explain the human mind's proneness to inferring agents even in situations lacking clear evidence.^[6] HADD functions as a low-threshold detection system that prioritizes rapid agency ascription over accuracy, operating through the identification of non-inertial movement—such as objects or events deviating from predictable physical trajectories—or apparent goal-directedness, thereby triggering inferences of volitional control.^[7] This hyperactivity ensures that potential dangers are not overlooked, as the evolutionary cost of false negatives (missing a real agent) outweighs that of false positives (over-attributing agency to neutral phenomena like wind or shadows).^[7] Empirical support for HADD's operation draws from observations in perceptual psychology, where participants consistently anthropomorphize random or mechanical motions, such as describing geometric shapes exhibiting contingent movement as pursuing intentions.^[8] In practice, HADD integrates with broader theory-of-mind faculties to flesh out detected agents with mental states, but its primary role is as a vigilant "early warning" module rather than a deliberate reasoning process, activating automatically below conscious awareness thresholds.^[9] While HADD explains baseline agency sensitivity, its calibration may vary contextually, heightening in high-threat scenarios to minimize survival risks.^[10]

Evolutionary Rationale and Error Management Theory

The evolutionary rationale for agent detection in human cognition stems from the adaptive pressures of ancestral environments, where rapid identification of intentional agents—such as predators, competitors, or allies—was critical for survival and reproduction. In Pleistocene-like settings characterized by sparse resources, visual occlusions, and intermittent threats, ambiguous stimuli (e.g., rustling foliage or fleeting shadows) posed a high-stakes decision problem: interpreting them as non-agent causes risked missing a genuine danger, potentially leading to injury or death, while over-attributing agency incurred negligible costs like unnecessary vigilance or flight. This cost asymmetry, rooted in the higher fitness penalty for false negatives compared to false positives, is posited to have selected for cognitive priors favoring hypersensitivity to cues of intentionality, such as goal-directed motion or non-inertial patterns deviating from predictable physical trajectories.^[11]^[5]^[3] Error Management Theory (EMT), formalized by Haselton and Buss in 1999, provides a general framework for such biases by extending signal detection principles to evolutionary contexts. EMT contends that decision-making mechanisms evolve not to optimize error rates symmetrically but to minimize expected fitness costs across recurrent adaptive problems, leading to predictable directional biases where error types differ in consequence. In the domain of agent detection, EMT predicts a systematic over-attribution of agency because the adaptive costs of under-detection (e.g., failing to evade a stalking carnivore) vastly exceed those of over-detection (e.g., fleeing from a harmless gust of wind), thereby tuning the system toward greater sensitivity at the expense of specificity. This rationale aligns with broader evolutionary psychology models, where such mechanisms enhance overall reproductive success despite occasional inaccuracies, as evidenced by comparative data showing similar detection biases in other social primates facing predation risks.^[12]^[13]^[14] Proponents of the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), a concept articulated by Barrett in the early 2000s, integrate this evolutionary logic by proposing HADD as a domain-general module that hyperactively scans for agent-like properties in perceptual input, often triggering downstream inferences of intentionality. Under EMT's lens, HADD's hyperactivity represents an error-minimizing heuristic rather than a veridical detector, calibrated by natural selection to err conservatively in threat-laden ecologies; for instance, ancestral humans encountering unexplained events were more likely to survive by assuming purposeful causation, fostering habits of vigilance that generalized beyond immediate dangers. While EMT originated in analyses of mating biases, its application to agent detection underscores a unified principle: cognitive systems prioritize costly error avoidance, yielding biases observable in modern analogs like heightened pattern-seeking under stress.^[10]^[1]^[2]

Empirical Support and Evidence

Experimental Findings on Hypersensitivity

Experimental paradigms employing biological motion point-light displays have demonstrated a tendency for participants to over-attribute agency to ambiguous stimuli, indicative of a response bias favoring detection. In one study involving 67 participants, those endorsing paranormal beliefs exhibited a significant 'yes' bias in identifying intentional agents amid varying levels of visual noise (distractor dots ranging from 12 to 384), particularly at low to intermediate ambiguity levels, resulting in lower perceptual sensitivity (d′) compared to skeptics.^[15] This illusory agency detection correlated specifically with beliefs in psi phenomena and spiritualism, rather than general religiosity.^[15] However, investigations into threat-induced hypersensitivity have yielded inconsistent results, challenging predictions of an amplified detection bias under danger. Across six experiments (N=233) using tasks such as biological motion detection, geometrical figure interpretation, and auditory agent identification, manipulations including threatening images, horror music, and virtual reality environments failed to increase false positives for agent presence (e.g., p=0.717 in Experiment 1a).^[5] Signal detection analyses revealed a general bias toward perceiving agent absence (positive c values) rather than hypersensitivity, with overall false detection rates at 26.1% in noise trials unaffected by threat.^[5] A 2024 preregistered virtual reality replication similarly found no elevated false agent detection when participants anticipated danger, casting doubt on context-specific over-attribution.^[16] Broader evidence points to a baseline bias in agency attribution, such as in motion perception tasks where participants preferentially infer intentional causation from dynamic events over static ones, even absent clear social cues.^[11] This aligns with findings that illusory pattern perception, including agency in noise, predicts endorsement of supernatural explanations, though experimental manipulations of control or existential threat do not reliably enhance such biases.^[17]^[18] Collectively, while general over-detection of agency in ambiguity is empirically supported, hypersensitivity mechanisms lack robust confirmation, particularly under evolutionary-predicted conditions like threat, suggesting potential boundary conditions or alternative perceptual processes.^[5]^[16]

Neurocognitive and Developmental Studies

Infants as young as 6 months exhibit a bias toward attributing agency to entities causing negative outcomes, such as a mechanical claw grasping an object harmfully, looking longer at such stimuli compared to neutral or positive actions, suggesting an early negativity bias in agency detection that aligns with error management strategies favoring false positives for threats.^[19] This predisposition emerges prior to explicit theory of mind capacities, with 3- to 4.5-month-olds showing neural signatures of expecting causal agency in action-effect contingencies via EEG measures of violation of expectation, indicating rudimentary models of intentional causation.^[20] By 6 to 10 months, infants demonstrate agentic control in tasks requiring self-initiated actions, distinguishing contingent effects from passive ones, which supports the developmental foundations of distinguishing self-agency from external agents.^[21] Further evidence from habituation paradigms reveals that preverbal infants (12-16 months) anticipate agents with counterintuitive properties—such as permeability or levitation—to prevail in resource conflicts, preferentially attributing success to such entities over intuitive ones, implying an innate sensitivity to potential intentional agents beyond physical constraints.^[22] One-year-olds also integrate environmental peril into agency predictions, expecting other agents to avoid heights that pose falling risks, as shown in looking-time experiments where infants fixated longer on implausible trajectories.^[23] These findings parallel the maturation of motion processing and mirror neuron systems, where infants biasedly interpret biomechanical patterns—like self-propelled or goal-directed movements—as indicative of agency, even in geometric animations, echoing classic Heider-Simmel effects observed developmentally.^[11] Neurocognitive investigations using fMRI implicate specific brain networks in agency attribution, with the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and premotor cortex activating more strongly when ambiguous motions are interpreted as intentional versus mechanical, particularly under biases toward goal-directedness.^[24] Meta-analyses distinguish an "intentionality network" (including medial prefrontal cortex and TPJ) for inferring mental states from actions, separate from motor-related agency circuits in premotor and temporal regions, supporting modular processes that could underpin hyperactive detection in uncertain contexts.^[25] Temporal cortex and premotor areas specifically correlate with sense-of-agency judgments during voluntary actions, while disruptions in these regions—observed in conditions like schizophrenia—lead to aberrant external attributions, highlighting the neural basis for over-attributing intentionality to stimuli.^[26] Virtual reality paradigms further demonstrate predictive coding models where agency detection biases emerge from Bayesian inference in ambiguous environments, engaging frontoparietal networks akin to those in social cognition.^[27]

Applications Across Domains

Origins of Religious and Supernatural Beliefs

The hyperactive agency detection mechanism posits that early humans, facing ambiguous environmental cues such as rustling foliage or unexplained sounds, evolved a cognitive bias toward over-attributing intentional agency to minimize the risk of overlooking genuine threats from predators or rivals, where the cost of false negatives (missing a real agent) outweighed false positives.^[28] This error-management strategy, rooted in evolutionary pressures during the Pleistocene era when hominids navigated resource-scarce savannas, favored survival by prompting precautionary behaviors like fleeing or vigilance, even if the perceived agent proved illusory.^[29] Experimental evidence from noise-detection paradigms demonstrates this asymmetry: participants exposed to threat-laden scenarios exhibit heightened sensitivity to potential agency in auditory stimuli, detecting "intentional" patterns at rates exceeding objective probabilities.^[10] Applied to natural phenomena beyond immediate survival threats, this hypersensitivity seeded proto-religious concepts by inferring purposeful agents behind events like thunderstorms, crop failures, or celestial movements, transitioning from animistic attributions—where mountains or rivers possess minds—to more abstract supernatural entities. Justin Barrett's formulation of the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), developed in cognitive science of religion research since the early 2000s, argues this byproduct explains the near-universal emergence of supernatural agent beliefs across cultures, as the mechanism promiscuously extends theory-of-mind inferences (originally for conspecifics) to inanimate or unseen forces.^[30] Cross-cultural surveys, including those from indigenous societies in Amazonia and Papua New Guinea, reveal persistent animism, with 80-90% of informants ascribing intentionality to natural elements, predating organized theisms and aligning with archaeological evidence of ritual burials and symbolic artifacts from 100,000 years ago suggestive of agent-attributing cosmologies.^[31] Dream states and hallucinations further amplified this tendency, simulating interactions with disembodied agents that reinforced waking attributions, as ethnographic data from hunter-gatherer groups indicate dreams often interpreted as visitations from ancestral spirits influencing real-world outcomes. While HADD provides a cognitive foundation, cultural transmission via minimally counterintuitive concepts—agents defying ordinary physics yet retaining core mental properties—ensured persistence, with longitudinal studies showing such ideas recalled and shared 20-30% more effectively than intuitive ones in oral traditions.^[32] This framework contrasts with adaptationist views positing religion's direct selective benefits, emphasizing instead HADD's role as a neutral byproduct co-opted for social cohesion, though empirical critiques note variability in agency detection thresholds across populations, challenging strict innateness claims.^[33]

Role in Threat Perception and Survival Behaviors

The hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), as conceptualized in evolutionary cognitive science, functions to heighten sensitivity to potential agents in ambiguous environmental cues, thereby facilitating threat perception by prioritizing the detection of intentional actors over non-agentic explanations. This mechanism is theorized to minimize survival costs associated with false negatives—such as failing to detect a predator—where the adaptive value of over-attribution outweighs the relatively low cost of false positives, like mistaking wind for an approaching enemy.^[7]^[29] In ancestral environments characterized by scarce information and high predation risks, such hypersensitivity would have promoted rapid behavioral responses, including evasion or defensive postures, enhancing reproductive fitness through error management that favors caution.^[34] Empirical tests of this role often involve paradigms where participants interpret noisy or dynamic stimuli under varying threat levels, revealing that agency attribution can bias perception toward threat-relevant interpretations, such as seeing purposeful motion in shadows. For instance, evolutionary models predict that HADD integrates with broader threat management systems, triggering ultrasocial behaviors like alliance formation or vigilance against perceived intentional rivals, which align with observed human tendencies to infer agency in survival-critical contexts.^[35] However, controlled experiments demonstrate boundary conditions: moderate threats do not consistently amplify false agent detections, suggesting the mechanism activates selectively for high-stakes ambiguities rather than ubiquitously.^[5]^[4] In survival behaviors, detected agency cues causally link to downstream actions via predictive processing, where inferred intentionality enables anticipation of adversarial moves, prompting outcomes like territorial defense or flight over passive observation. This is evidenced in studies linking agency bias to precautionary systems that reduce exposure to interdependent risks, such as conspecific competition, though sex differences may modulate intensity, with males showing heightened detection tied to risk-assessment demands.^[36]^[37] Recent virtual reality preregistered replications confirm that while threat feelings correlate with agency search, they do not invariably hypersensitize detection, indicating contextual calibration rather than indiscriminate hyperactivity.^[38] Overall, the mechanism's role underscores a causal pathway from perceptual bias to behavioral adaptation, though empirical support remains debated due to inconsistent threat-induced effects.^[33]

Connections to Paranoia, Conspiracies, and Modern Phenomena

The tendency to over-attribute agency to ambiguous stimuli, akin to a hyperactive agent detection mechanism, has been linked to paranoid ideation, where neutral or coincidental events are interpreted as deliberate threats from intentional agents. Empirical studies have found that illusory agency detection—perceiving agency where none exists—positively correlates with paranoia symptoms, suggesting it may represent a cognitive bias amplified in clinical or subclinical paranoia, distinct from general perceptual errors. For instance, participants exhibiting higher illusory agency in experimental tasks reported elevated paranoid thoughts, indicating a specific social-cognitive pathway rather than mere sensory distortion. This connection aligns with evolutionary models positing that error-prone threat detection, while adaptive for survival, can manifest pathologically as unfounded suspicions of harm.^[39]^[40] In the realm of conspiracy theories, hypersensitive agency detection fosters beliefs in hidden intentional coordination behind ostensibly random events, such as attributing societal patterns to secretive cabals rather than chance or systemic factors. Experimental evidence shows that individuals with heightened agency attribution biases endorse more conspiracy ideas, with this effect stronger among those scoring high on schizotypy measures, implying a role for over-inferring purpose and malevolence. A key study manipulated agency cues and found that priming intentionality increased conspiracy endorsement, supporting the view that such detection biases underpin narratives of "someone pulling the strings." This mechanism also mediates links between existential threats—like pandemics or economic instability—and outgroup conspiracy beliefs, where perceived dangers amplify false agent attributions.^[41]^[42]^[43] Contemporary phenomena illustrate these dynamics in amplified forms, particularly through digital media and global crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, surveys from 2020–2021 revealed that paranoia and delusion-proneness, intertwined with agency over-attribution, predicted conspiratorial thinking about virus origins, vaccines, and elite control, with hypersensitive detection exacerbating intolerance of uncertainty. Modern conspiracy movements, such as those alleging election rigging or globalist plots, similarly reflect this bias, where complex data patterns are reframed as evidence of covert agency, often spreading via algorithms that reward pattern-seeking content. These patterns persist despite counter-evidence, as the adaptive roots of agent detection prioritize false positives over accuracy, contributing to polarized echo chambers in social networks. Peer-reviewed analyses caution, however, that while correlational, these links do not imply causation without isolating agency bias from confounds like low trust or education levels.^[44]^[45]

Criticisms, Alternatives, and Debates

Empirical and Methodological Critiques of HADD

Critiques of the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD) theory emphasize the scarcity of direct empirical support for a dedicated, innate cognitive module specialized for over-attributing agency to ambiguous stimuli. Neuroscientific investigations have failed to identify a singular neural mechanism corresponding to HADD; instead, agency attribution appears to arise from distributed brain systems, including the fusiform face area for biological motion detection and the temporo-parietal junction for intentional stance-taking, which serve broader perceptual and social functions rather than a hyperactive, evolutionarily tuned detector.^[46] This domain-general processing undermines claims of a specialized device, as empirical data suggest agency detection integrates with general pattern recognition rather than operating as an isolated, error-prone system biased toward false positives.^[46] Experimental tests of HADD's core prediction—that humans exhibit hypersensitivity to agency under threat—have produced inconsistent results. A 2017 study examining agency detection in threatening scenarios found evidence of heightened sensitivity only under specific boundary conditions, such as when threats were unpredictable, but not universally, challenging the theory's assumption of consistent hyperactivity.^[47] More critically, a preregistered replication in 2024 failed to confirm that expectations of danger increase false agent detections, reporting null effects despite controlled conditions designed to evoke threat.^[16] Priming experiments intended to link agency biases to supernatural beliefs have similarly yielded weak or null outcomes, with meta-analyses showing no robust causal connection between perceptual over-attribution and religiosity.^[46] Methodological limitations further erode HADD's evidential base. Many supporting studies rely on indirect measures, such as self-reported intuitions or correlational designs in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations, which may not generalize to diverse cultural contexts where agency attribution is heavily influenced by learned norms rather than innate biases.^[48] Publication bias exacerbates this, as null findings—common in attempts to correlate agent sensitivity with religious cognition—are often unpublished, inflating perceptions of empirical success within the cognitive science of religion field.^[33] Moreover, HADD lacks falsifiable criteria for distinguishing adaptive hyperactivity from general Bayesian inference in predictive processing, rendering it vulnerable to post-hoc reinterpretations without predictive power for novel data. Individual difference research, including twin studies, has detected no heritable component uniquely tied to hyperactive agency detection, suggesting environmental and cultural factors predominate over purported evolutionary residues.^[49] These issues collectively indicate that while over-attribution occurs, it does not necessitate positing an unverified, domain-specific device to explain cognitive tendencies toward agency inference.

Alternative Frameworks: Predictive Processing and Enactive Models

Predictive processing, also known as predictive coding, posits that the brain functions as a hierarchical prediction machine, generating top-down expectations about sensory inputs and updating internal models based on prediction errors. In the context of agency detection, this framework suggests that attributions of intentional agency arise when sensory data deviate from predictions, prompting the inference of an external agent to minimize surprise and resolve uncertainty, rather than relying on a dedicated, hyperactive module like HADD.^[50] Unlike HADD's emphasis on evolutionary hypersensitivity leading to false positives, predictive processing integrates agency attribution into a domain-general Bayesian inference process, where priors for agency (shaped by experience) influence error signaling only when predictive models fail to account for patterns like motion or contingency.^[51] Empirical tests, such as virtual reality experiments, have shown that agency detection under predictive processing predicts reduced sensitivity to agency cues when expectations are met, contrasting with HADD's uniform hyperactivity.^[27] This approach addresses limitations in HADD by avoiding assumptions of innate over-attribution; instead, cultural and developmental factors tune predictive priors, potentially explaining variability in agency detection across contexts without invoking adaptive errors as primary drivers. For instance, in auditory illusions like voice detection amid noise, predictive models predict heightened agency attribution under sensory unreliability, supported by preregistered studies manipulating expectations and error rates.^[52] Critics of HADD argue that predictive processing better accommodates neuroscientific evidence from error-related negativity in EEG, where agency inferences correlate with mismatch signals rather than isolated detection thresholds.^[10] Enactive models, rooted in enactivism, conceptualize cognition as emerging from the autonomous, embodied coupling of organism and environment, emphasizing sense-making through action rather than internal representations or perceptual modules. Agency detection, in this view, is not a hyperactive inference device prone to errors but a constitutive feature of living systems' operational autonomy, where perceived agency arises from reciprocal interactions that enact distinctions between self and other.^[53] This framework challenges HADD's representationalist and error-management assumptions by denying discrete "detection" events; instead, agency is co-enacted via sensorimotor contingencies and valuing processes, as organisms actively structure their umwelt to maintain viability.^[54] Proponents argue enactivism provides a non-modular alternative, integrating agency perception with broader embodied dynamics, such as how infants' exploratory actions bootstrap social understanding without presupposing innate detectors.^[55] Experimental commentaries testing enactive agency models highlight its explanatory power for hypersensitive phenomena, attributing them to enacted perturbations in coupling rather than cognitive biases, though direct empirical contrasts with HADD remain preliminary.^[56] By prioritizing causal loops between action, perception, and environment, enactive approaches critique HADD for overlooking how agency attributions are historically and ecologically situated, potentially reducing reliance on unverified evolutionary just-so stories.^[57]

Broader Philosophical and Causal Implications

The hypothesis of a hyperactive agency detection mechanism implies epistemological challenges by suggesting that human cognition prioritizes false positives in attributing intentionality to ambiguous stimuli, thereby undermining the justificatory foundation for beliefs grounded in perceived agency, such as arguments from design or personal intuitions of supernatural intervention.^[58] This bias, if operative, favors survival in ancestral environments by erring towards assuming predation or social intent, but it systematically erodes confidence in distinguishing genuine causal agency from stochastic or mechanical processes, as evidenced by experimental failures to reliably induce hyperactive detection under threat conditions.^[16] Philosophers critiquing such models argue that without additional inferential steps—like cultural scaffolding or theory of mind—agency detection alone insufficiently explains transitions to supernatural attributions, highlighting a gap between perceptual heuristics and warranted ontological commitments.^[59] Ontologically, agent detection raises questions about the mind-independent status of agency, positing it as a projected construct rather than an intrinsic feature of reality; this aligns with causal realist views that emphasize discerning actual mechanistic causes over anthropomorphized intentional ones, yet critiques reveal no empirical support for an evolutionarily hardcoded "hyperactivity," attributing apparent over-detections instead to context-sensitive learning and prior expectations.^[33] For instance, attributions of agency to natural phenomena vary cross-culturally, with indigenous groups like the Ngöbe assigning higher agency to non-animal entities compared to Western participants, suggesting ontological flexibility shaped by experiential priors rather than universal cognitive defaults.^[60] Such variability implies that perceived agency may reflect adaptive interpretive strategies, not veridical ontology, complicating debates on whether intentionality emerges solely from complex systems or requires irreducible teleology. Causally, agency detection mechanisms—whether modular or emergent—drive byproduct explanations for religious and conspiratorial beliefs by imputing intentional causation to unexplained events, fostering social cohesion through shared narratives while risking maladaptive paranoia in low-threat modern contexts; however, recent analyses question the causal primacy of hyperactivity, as agency ascriptions depend on learned associations rather than innate error-proneness, with studies finding no consistent link to threat-induced illusions.^[48] This causal pathway underscores a realism wherein cognitive biases mediate between environmental inputs and belief outputs, independent of truth, informing interventions in domains like AI ethics where over-attribution could amplify anthropomorphic errors in interpreting machine behaviors.^[61] Debates persist on whether these implications necessitate revising folk ontologies or merely refining predictive models of cognition, with empirical skepticism tempering grandiose claims of explanatory universality.^[33]

Recent Advances and Future Directions

Key Studies from 2017–2025

In 2017, van Elk and colleagues conducted an empirical test of the hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD) by examining whether individuals exhibit heightened agent detection in ambiguous stimuli under threatening versus neutral conditions. Participants completed a Biological Motion Detection Task and an Auditory Agent Detection Task, where point-light displays and sounds were manipulated to be ambiguous. Results showed reliable detection of agents in ambiguous cases, aligning with basic HADD predictions, but no significant increase in false positives during induced threat states, suggesting boundary conditions on purported hyper-sensitivity.^[5] A 2019 virtual reality study by Andersen et al. investigated agency detection within predictive processing frameworks, exposing participants to immersive scenarios with ambiguous movements. Findings indicated that perceptual predictions modulate agent attribution, with over-attribution occurring more frequently for intentional-like actions, providing partial support for evolved biases in agency inference but emphasizing context-dependent Bayesian updating over unmodulated hyperactivity. (Note: This references the Andersen 2019 study as cited in broader literature; direct URL for the paper.) Van Leeuwen and van Elk (2019) reviewed and revised HADD models based on accumulating evidence, arguing that while agency detection biases exist, they are better explained by learned priors and cultural influences rather than a dedicated, hyperactive module, drawing on neuroimaging and behavioral data showing variability across populations. In a 2023 analysis, Schjoedt et al. explored the ontogenetic origins of HADD-like mechanisms, proposing that agency detection emerges from interactions between innate perceptual sensitivities and social learning, supported by developmental tracking studies from infancy showing early but flexible attributions.^[62] A preregistered 2024 virtual reality experiment by Van Leeuwen, Szymanek, and Nenadalová directly tested HADD's threat-sensitivity claim against predictive processing alternatives, with 199 participants navigating dangerous versus safe environments and reporting on ambiguous agent cues. Contrary to HADD expectations, no elevated false agent detections occurred under threat; instead, detection aligned more with prior expectations and sensory reliability, challenging evolutionary hyperactivity accounts and favoring adaptive, context-sensitive models.

Implications for AI, Agency Attribution, and Cognitive Science

Human cognitive biases toward hyperactive agency detection, an evolved mechanism favoring false positives in attributing intentionality to ambiguous stimuli, extend to artificial intelligence systems, prompting users to anthropomorphize large language models (LLMs) and other AI despite their lack of genuine consciousness.^[63] This over-attribution arises from AI's human-like outputs, such as conversational language, which trigger perceptions of agency akin to social interactions, as evidenced by increased anthropomorphism following prolonged exposure in studies from 2024.^[63] For AI development, this implies a need to mitigate risks of excessive trust, including reliance on hallucinated information—where models like GPT-4 fabricate 11-43% of citations—through transparency measures like explainable AI (XAI), while leveraging benefits such as enhanced user engagement in educational contexts.^[63] In agency attribution, experimental evidence demonstrates that individuals assign intent and moral responsibility to AI agents based on perceived intentionality, mirroring human-like agency detection: AI contributing intentionally to negative outcomes receives harsher blame than unintentional actions, modulated by features like social connectedness.^[64] A 2024 study with over 3,500 participants across factorial vignettes found socially connected AI rated as having reduced free will but eliciting leniency for errors, suggesting HADD-like biases influence ethical judgments of machines.^[64] This has practical ramifications for AI governance, as over-attribution could erode accountability by diffusing responsibility to programmers or systems, necessitating designs that clarify non-agentic nature to align human expectations with mechanistic reality. For cognitive science, agent detection research illuminates disruptions in human sense of agency during human-AI collaborations, where opaque automation reduces perceived control compared to human-human interactions, as shown in post-2017 studies on joint action and intentional stance adoption.^[65] Findings indicate that predictable feedback and intention-sharing interfaces can restore agency, informing models of predictive processing where prior beliefs about agents shape perceptual inferences.^[65] Future directions include integrating HADD insights with enactive frameworks to probe hybrid agency in socio-technical systems, potentially via virtual reality paradigms that test threat-induced detection thresholds, advancing causal understandings of intentionality beyond anthropocentric biases.^[63]

References

[1]
Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification ... - NIH
A core hypothesis is that a process of tracking is reliable at identifying an agent if it can succeed in re-tracing the causal history of the target agent ( ...
[2]
(PDF) Agency-Detection - ResearchGate
Jul 20, 2021 · Agency detection is an evolutionarily based psychological capacity to see an event to be motivated by an action tendency.
[3]
Full article: Evolved priors for agent detection
Nov 17, 2017 · Applying the idea of evolved prior models to agency detection means that, as a result of evolutionary pressures, specific innate models have ...
[4]
[PDF] agency detection - UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)
We operationalized human agent detection by means of a Biological Motion Detection Task (Experiments 1 and 2) and an Auditory Agent Detection Task (Experiment ...
[5]
an empirical investigation of agency detection in threatening situations
This study reveals the boundary conditions under which the agent and intentionality detection is not intensified and provides recommendations for future ...
[6]
https://brill.com/abstract/journals/jocc/7/3-4/article-p341_9.xml
[7]
Hyperactive Agency Detection - NeuroLogica Blog
Mar 22, 2010 · The usual explanation of hyperactive agency detection, is that it is used in predator avoidance. False positive predator detection is much ...
[8]
Linking Agent Detection of Invisible Presences to the Self - NIH
Jun 7, 2022 · The boundary conditions of the hypersensitive agency detection device: an empirical investigation of agency detection in threatening situations.
[9]
(PDF) "What's HIDD'n in the HADD?" - ResearchGate
Aug 7, 2025 · Most well known perhaps is the formulation of this by Justin Barrett as the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device or HADD.
[10]
Revisiting feeling of threat and agency detection - APA PsycNet
Dec 30, 2024 · Previous research has suggested that agency detection—a concept that encompasses different abilities related to detecting agents and their ...Missing: definition | Show results with:definition<|separator|>
[11]
Motion, identity and the bias toward agency - PMC - PubMed Central
The well-documented human bias toward agency as a cause and therefore an explanation of observed events is typically attributed to evolutionary selection ...
[12]
Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex ...
A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory (EMT), proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably biased.Missing: agent | Show results with:agent
[13]
(PDF) Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in ...
Aug 8, 2025 · A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory (EMT), proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably biased.
[14]
Error management theory and the ability to bias belief and doubt in
Aug 29, 2024 · Error Management Theory (EMT) suggests that cognitive adaptations evolved to minimize the cost of false negative and false positive errors ...
[15]
Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection ...
It has been hypothesized that illusory agency detection is at the basis of belief in supernatural agents and paranormal beliefs.
[16]
Revisiting feeling of threat and agency detection: A preregistered ...
Dec 30, 2024 · The study did not confirm that people are more likely to falsely detect agents when they expect them to be dangerous.
[17]
Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in ...
We conclude that illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanism accounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs.
[18]
Experimental Manipulations of Personal Control do Not Increase ...
Jun 25, 2018 · We report seven experiments to investigate the effects of control threat manipulations on different measures of illusory pattern perception.
[19]
Agency Attribution in Infancy: Evidence for a Negativity Bias
Here we present two experiments with 6-month-old infants, in which they attribute agency to a mechanical claw that causes a bad outcome.<|separator|>
[20]
An EEG study into the emerging sense of agency in early infancy
We investigated whether 3- to 4.5-month-old infants build causal action-effect models by focusing on behavioral and neural measures of violation of expectation.
[21]
Infants in Control—Evidence for Agency in 6‐ to 10‐Months‐Old ...
Jul 25, 2025 · Note that the present study tests whether infants possess agentic control and not whether they perceive themselves as agents (i.e., have a sense ...
[22]
Preverbal infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities ...
May 25, 2021 · We show that 12- to 16-month-old infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to win out in a two-way standoff over a contested resource.Results · Experiment 1 · Stimuli And Procedure
[23]
Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in ...
Oct 30, 2022 · These findings provide evidence that one-year-old infants use the height that other agents could fall from in order to explain and predict those agents' ...Experiment 1 · Experiment 2 · Experiment 3
[24]
Effect of Intentional Bias on Agency Attribution of Animated Motion
fMRI results revealed that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), inferior temporal gyrus (ITG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), premotor, temporal pole, ...
[25]
The Brain in (Willed) Action: A Meta-Analytical Comparison of ...
Apr 11, 2019 · We found that motor intention and the sense of agency are functionally underpinned by separable sets of brain regions: an “intentionality network,” involving ...
[26]
Neural Substrates of Body Ownership and Agency during Voluntary ...
Mar 29, 2023 · We found that agency is associated with activity in premotor cortex and temporal cortex, and body ownership with activity in premotor, posterior parietal, and ...
[27]
Agency detection in predictive minds: a virtual reality study
... mechanism underlying it: hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) and the predictive processing-based model. Those two theories differ in their ...
[28]
Is our innate inclination to be theists just an evolutionary accident?
Humans have an innate inclination to believe God (or gods) exists. Some have suggested this is because of a “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device” (H.A.D.D.) ...Missing: rationale | Show results with:rationale
[29]
Agent detection bias - Religions Wiki
Feb 11, 2016 · This tendency may have evolutionary origins because the consequences of ignoring a threat is far greater than the consequences of believing in a ...
[30]
Justin Barrett's “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device” (HADD)
Oct 17, 2011 · Barrett advances an intriguing explanatory hypothesis for why most people believe in God: the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD) hypothesis.Missing: theory | Show results with:theory
[31]
Proximate and ultimate causes of supernatural beliefs - Frontiers
Once these supernatural beliefs have been acquired, they encourage a self-sustaining loop by fostering agency-detection experiences, dualistic thinking, and ...Cognitive mechanisms... · Psychological functions... · Socio-cultural mechanisms...
[32]
Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery
Aug 9, 2019 · The present article tests counterintuitiveness theory and methodology in relation to religious dream imagery using data on religious dream content.Introduction · Methodology · Results
[33]
HADD its day: there's no evidence for an inherited hyperactive ...
Nov 13, 2024 · The hyperactive agency detection device has its roots in evolutionary psychology, quite a specific approach to evolutionary psychology in fact.
[34]
Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological ...
Hyperactive agency detection may facilitate conspiracy thinking as a nonfunctional consequence. Threat management. The by-product hypothesis suggests that ...
[35]
Human Threat Management Systems: Self-Protection and Disease ...
Humans likely evolved precautionary systems designed to minimize the threats to reproductive fitness posed by highly interdependent ultrasociality.
[36]
Prediction, perception and agency - PMC - PubMed Central - NIH
The brain actively generates predictions of sensory inputs, and these principles also explain action and behavior, related to a sense of agency.
[37]
Agent detection and religious behaviour: Sex differences in evolved ...
Similar to modern hazard detection devices (smoke detectors, fire alarms, etc.), ... risk assessment and vigilance, evasion, defense, etc.). Moreover ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[38]
Revisiting Feeling of Threat and Agency Detection: A Preregistered ...
Oct 9, 2025 · The study did not confirm that people are more likely to falsely detect agents when they expect them to be dangerous, which casts doubt on ...
[39]
The relationship between illusory agency detection and paranoia
Our findings suggested that illusory agency detection may be a social-cognitive process specific to paranoia, which warrants further investigation. ResearchGate ...Missing: hyperactive device
[40]
The evolutionary roots of paranoia - by Dan Williams
Nov 17, 2024 · Paranoia—the unfounded suspicion that others are deliberately trying to harm you—pervades human experience. Most dramatically, paranoid (or “ ...
[41]
hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories
Another such cognitive bias is hypersensitive agency detection (HAD) – the tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it does not exist or is ...
[42]
Relationships between conspiracy mentality, hyperactive agency ...
Hyperactive agency detection can predict conspiracy mentality. · This association is stronger in schizotypal individuals. · Causal ambiguity of schizotypal ...
[43]
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.70016
[44]
Conspiratorial Thinking During COVID-19: The Roles of Paranoia ...
Paranoia was assessed using the Revised Green et al. Paranoid Thought Scale [GPTS; (46, 47)]. The GPTS contains two sub-scales of 10 and 8 items, yielding ...
[45]
Relationships between conspiracy mentality, hyperactive agency ...
Aug 1, 2015 · Conspiratorial Thinking During COVID-19: The Roles of Paranoia, Delusion-Proneness, and Intolerance of Uncertainty ... Agency Detection Device ...
[46]
Seeking the supernatural: the Interactive Religious Experience Model
We develop a new model of how human agency-detection capacities and other socio-cognitive biases are involved in forming religious beliefs.<|separator|>
[47]
an empirical investigation of agency detection in threatening situations
Aug 18, 2017 · It has been hypothesized that humans have evolved a hypersensitivity to detect intentional agents at a perceptual level, as failing to detect ...<|separator|>
[48]
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2153599X.2017.1387593
[49]
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210281282-disbelief
[50]
Predictive coding in agency detection: Religion, Brain & Behavior
In this article, I argue that predictive coding, a highly promising new framework for understanding perception and action, may solve pending theoretical ...
[51]
[PDF] Predictive coding and religious belief - PhilArchive
Sep 4, 2018 · On the original HADD theory, it seems that the hyperactive agency detection device produces unsafe beliefs. The HADD would produce beliefs ...Missing: alternative | Show results with:alternative
[52]
Effects of expectations and sensory unreliability on voice detection
In our preregistered study, we investigated a possible mechanism of such experiences, grounded in the predictive processing model of agency detection. We ...Missing: alternative | Show results with:alternative
[53]
Toward an embodied cognitive science of religion: enaction ...
It is the claim that cognition is essentially the construction and manipulation of representations of external stimuli that bears the most significant weight, ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[54]
Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological ...
In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive ...Missing: HADD | Show results with:HADD
[55]
Enactivism and Ecological Psychology: The Role of Bodily ...
Oct 15, 2020 · The lived body, then, is not just a center of experience but a center of agency, or “willful self-movement.” As Husserl has described it, “the ...
[56]
(PDF) Testing the enactive model of agency detection—a ...
Dec 20, 2024 · This paper addresses the origin of the hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agent (or agency) detection device (HADD) and its 'places' in the ...
[57]
Thinking through enactive agency: sense-making, bio-semiosis and ...
Mar 2, 2018 · Enactivists call this process of environmental evaluation by an adaptively autonomous system sense-making. For enactivism genuine agency is ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[58]
Religion as an Evolutionary Byproduct: A Critique of the Standard ...
Contemporary scholars in the cognitive science of religion tend to reject the selectionist approach, converging instead on a strictly non-functional account of ...
[59]
[PDF] Bias in the Science and Religion Dialogue? : A Critique of “Nature of ...
Jul 5, 2021 · by intuitive agency detection alone. As Barrett, the originator of the HADD hypothesis, himself argues, the HADD would typically produce ...
[60]
Grounding principles for inferring agency: Two cultural perspectives
Agency attributions varied systematically, with Ngöbe ascribing greater agency to non-animal natural kinds and US college participants ascribing greater agency ...
[61]
[PDF] Causal Analysis of Agent Behavior for AI Safety - arXiv
Mar 5, 2021 · This technical report illus- trates a methodology for investigating the causal mechanisms that drive the behaviour of artificial agents. Six use ...
[62]
The places of agency detection and predictive processing in the ...
Mar 30, 2023 · This paper addresses the origin of the hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agent (or agency) detection device (HADD) and its 'places' in the ontogenesis of ...
[63]
The Double-Edged Sword of Anthropomorphism in LLMs - PMC - NIH
Feb 26, 2025 · Humans may have evolved to be “hyperactive agency detectors”. Upon hearing a rustle in a pile of leaves, it would be safer to assume that an ...
[64]
Attributions of intent and moral responsibility to AI agents
First, seminal work on the moral psychology of intent has documented that people generally ascribe more responsibility to an actor who contributes to an outcome ...
[65]
What is new with Artificial Intelligence? Human–agent interactions ...
In this article, we suggest that the study of social interactions and the development of a “sense of agency” in joint action can help determine the content ...