Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do
August
Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do
David. L. R. Maij 0 1
Frenk van Harreveld 0 1
Will Gervais 1
Yann Schrag 1
Christine Mohr 1
Michiel van Elk 0 1
0 University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology , Amsterdam , The Netherlands , 2 University of Kentucky, Department of Psychology, Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America, 3 University of Lausanne, Institute of Psychology , Lausanne , Switzerland
1 Editor: Michel Botbol, Universite de Bretagne Occidentale , FRANCE
The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in supernatural agents. In five studies we cross-culturally investigated the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural agents with large sample sizes (over 67,000 participants in total) and different operationalizations of mentalizing. The relative importance of mentalizing for endorsing supernatural beliefs was directly compared with credibility enhancing displays±the extent to which people observed credible religious acts during their upbringing. We also compared autistic with neurotypical adolescents. The empathy quotient and the autism-spectrum quotient were not predictive of belief in supernatural agents in all countries (i.e., The Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States), although we did observe a curvilinear effect in the United States. We further observed a strong influence of credibility enhancing displays on belief in supernatural agents. These findings highlight the importance of cultural learning for acquiring supernatural beliefs and ask for reconsiderations of the importance of mentalizing.
-
Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are
within the paper and its Supporting Information
files.
Funding: This study was funded by a grant from
the Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Research (NWO: VENI Grant No. 016.135.135).
Competing interests: The authors have declared
that no competing interests exist.
Introduction
According to conservative estimates, at least 80% of the world population believes in
intentional supernatural agents [
1
]. In this context, we refer to supernatural agents as an umbrella
term for all intentional agents not conforming to a naturalistic worldview. Given this
impressive number, the question arises what underlies this apparently universal human tendency to
believe in intentional supernatural agents. One suggestion is that these beliefs emerge as
byproducts of normal evolved cognitive mechanisms, such as dualistic reasoning[
2
]. This
suggestion is well established in the cognitive science of religion [
3
].
One of the key cognitive mechanisms hypothesized to underlie supernatural beliefs is the
ability to mentalize or to engage in theory of mind (ToM) reasoning [2,4±17]. This is the
ability to attribute intentions, beliefs, and desires to other minds [
18,19
]. The logic underlying this
hypothesis is that in order for people to be able to believe in intentional supernatural agents,
they should at least have the mentalizing abilities required to conceptualize the agent's
intentions [8,17]. Specifically, the idea is that an evolved cognitive mechanism for inferring
intentionality of human agents is similarly activated when inferring the intentionality of
supernatural agents. In the current study, we aimed to investigate whether mentalizing abilities are
indeed important for supporting belief in supernatural agents, by investigating whether
individual differences in mentalizing covary with degrees of belief. Also, we placed the relative
importance of mentalizing in context by comparing it to the importance of credibility
enhancing displays±the extent to which people observed credible religious acts during their
upbringing [20±22].
In the existing literature, the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural
beliefs has been investigated in different ways. In one line of studies, researchers used the
(shortened) Empathy Quotient [
23,24
], because mentalizing was argued to be important to
empathy [
16,17,25
]. The link between the EQ and supernatural beliefs was found to be
statistically significant, but modest (i.e., all r's < .22). However, the EQ did not predict supernatural
beliefs when variables such as analytic thinking or moral concern were taken into account
[26]. Moreover, the psychometric validity of the scale has been critiqued, as the scale does not
correlate to mentalizing ability tasks [
27
]. As a result, the EQ cannot be considered to
unequivocally assess mentalizing. In other studies, taking into account a wider variety of
operationalizations of mentalizing such as the reading the mind in the eye test and the perspective-taking
task, the authors reported inconsistent relationships between mentalizing and supernatural
beliefs [
16,26
]. The reading the mind in the eye test was significantly related to supernatural
beliefs in the study of Norenzayan et (...truncated)