Oceanic plates are doubly curved spherical shells, which influences how they respond to loading during subduction. Here we study a viscous fluid model for gravity‐driven subduction of a shell comprising a spherical plate and an attached slab. The shell is 100–1,000 times more viscous than the upper mantle. We use the boundary‐element method to solve for the flow. Solutions of an axisymmetric model show that the effect of sphericity on the flexure of shells is greater for smaller shells that are more nearly flat (the “sphericity paradox”). Both axisymmetric and three‐dimensional models predict that the deviatoric membrane stress in the slab should be dominated by the longitudinal normal stress (hoop stress), which is typically about twice as large as the downdip stress and of opposite sign. Our models also predict that concave‐landward slabs can exhibit both compressive and tensile hoop stress depending on the depth, whereas the hoop stress in convex slabs is always compressive. We test these two predictions against slab shape and earthquake focal mechanism data from the Mariana subduction zone, assuming that the deviatoric stress in our flow models corresponds to that implied by centroid moment tensors. The magnitude of the hoop stress exceeds that of the downdip stress for about half the earthquakes surveyed, partially verifying our first prediction. Our second prediction is supported by the near‐absence of earthquakes under tensile hoop stress in the portion of the slab having convex geometry.