Humans in particular attribute intentions to agents to project beliefs or to infer emotions, and involves two steps:[3] Scientists believe that the belief in acting gods is an evolutionary by-product of agent detection, and can be considered a spandrel, which is a non-adaptive trait formed as a side effect of an adaptive trait.
[4] The psychological trait in question is "if you hear a twig snap in the forest, some sentient force is probably behind it", leading to primates avoiding potential predators seeking to eat or murder them.
Thus, some evolutionary psychologists theorize that "even if the snapping was caused by the wind, modern humans are still inclined to attribute the sound to a sentient agent; they call this person a god".
The neocortex ratio (volume of gray matter) of the human brain is much larger as compared to other animals as it is only 2% of body weight while consuming 20% of the energy ingested.
Communal exchange of information allowed groups to establish rules, roles, and rites, leading to the phenomena of religious and paranormal practices.
This structure also mostly resolved the free-rider problem (those that take advantage of the survival effort of others and contribute little in return), as argued by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind.