Humans have been said to easily fall under the illusion that someone is present in their environment. We tend to see monsters in the piles of clothes at night, clouds seem to take the shape of human faces and some people claim to have encountered ghosts, UFOs and other supernatural beings. The field of cognitive science of religion (CSR) has long proposed an evolutionary approach to this wide class of psychological phenomena: we over-detect agency in our surroundings, because it is more adaptive for us to assume that a possibly dangerous agent is present than otherwise. However, studies have so far yielded inconclusive evidence as to whether this “Pascal’s wager” claim holds. The present study aims to readdress this issue with improved methodology and in a new theoretical framework, with the goal being to test if expecting to encounter alerting agents increases agency detection.

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