From individual to social counterintuitiveness: how layers of innovation weave together to form multilayered tapestries of human cultures

The emerging field of cognition and culture has had some success in explaining the spread of counterintuitive religious concepts
around the world. However, researchers have been reluctant to extend its findings to explain the widespread occurrence of
culturally counterintuitive ideas in general. This article develops a broader notion of social counterintuitiveness to include
ideas that violate shared expectations of a group of people and argues that the notion of social counterintuitiveness is more
crucial to explaining cultural success of surprising ideas than the traditional notion of individual counterintuitiveness.
Building on the context-based account of individual counterintuitiveness, the article also outlines how the once unorthodox
cultural ideas become conventionalized over time only to be swept under the next wave of cultural innovation. By helping us
peel away the layers of tradition that weave together the multilayered tapestry of culture, this account can be useful for
understanding the development of cultural scaffolding that is needed to support the spread of maximally counterintuitive concepts
such as widespread religious concepts of God and ghosts.