A Paucity of Diversity in Supernatural Beings

In principle, there should be no limit to the diversity of supernatural beings that humans can imagine. However, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has argued, only a limited repertoire of such beings is exploited in human religions. Its members—ghosts, gods, ancestor spirits, dragons, and so on—have in common two features: 1. They each violate some major intuitive expectations about living beings: the expectation of mortality, of belonging to one and only one species, of being limited ...

 Rounded Numbers are Cultural Attractors

Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: They are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issues of journals, the millionth copy sold of a record, and so on. This, in turn, creates a special cultural attractor for prices, just below rounded numbers—$9.99 or $9,990 are likely price tags—so as to avoid the evocation of a higher magnitude.