Belief in the supernatural is a cultural universal. While there is considerable variation in supernatural belief systems across cultures, some form of belief in gods, spirits, and similar phenomena occurs in all cultures. There is diversity in how religions are structured, the importance of ancestor spirits, whether gods and spirits are concerned with morality, and the number and type of religious practitioners.
A team of researchers comprised of Joshua Conrad Jackson, Danica Dillon, Brock Bastian, Joseph Watts, William Buckner, Nicholas DiMaggio, and Kurt Gray published an article in Nature Human Behaviour using ethnographic data from eHRAF World Cultures on how humans use the supernatural to try to understand their world.
The researchers found that while supernatural explanations appear to be universal, such explanations appear to be used much more often for natural phenomena, rather than social phenomena.
