Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do

PLOS ONE, Nov 2019

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.

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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)


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David. L. R. Maij, Frenk van Harreveld, Will Gervais, Yann Schrag, Christine Mohr, Michiel van Elk. Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do, PLOS ONE, 2017, Volume 12, Issue 8, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182764