Counterfactual imaginative culture as evidence hallucination in support of anxiety reduction

Why do human beings invest work in creating representations of objects and situations that do not exist, cannot be proven to exist, or exist by cultural convention? This study offers an explanation of this phenomenon by identifying counterfactual cultural production as a form of evidence hallucination, where anxiety-reducing cultural and cognitive models are made to be ‘true’ by flooding the perceptual environment with fabricated evidence of their truth. The theoretical framework builds on concepts from information theory, thermodynamics, and active-inference approaches to agent—environment interactions; it is tested against two cultural phenomena—religious evangelism as articulated in the four Gospels of the King James Version (KJV) Bible and symbols of collective identity in the form of national flags. The first study encodes English words into 64 categories using their sensorimotor associations, and predicts that the KJV should address existential anxiety by over-sampling positively valenced words with large semantic size from each sensory category—and in doing so, generate an implicit world-model that is lower in unpredictability than that of background English. The second study predicts that the visual entropy of national flags will positively scale with endogenous anxiety (collective worry about internal conflict) and that internal contrast will negatively scale with exogenous anxiety (collective worry about external threats)—with contrast anchoring entropy in the low contrast position. These studies are consistent with the view (but do not prove) that it is possible to predict detailed features of high-level cultural activity from affective dispositions using a straightforward formalism and without a ‘thick’ model of human cognition.