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

David L R Maij,Michiel Van Elk,Frenk Van Harreveld,Will Gervais,Yann Schrag,Christine Mohr

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0182764

David L R Maij, Michiel Van Elk + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182764

Copy DOI

Abstract

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.

Highlights

According to conservative estimates, at least 80% of the world population believes in intentional supernatural agents [1]
A third way in which our study extends earlier work is that we made use of both self-report questionnaires as well as an experimental test used in neuroimaging studies to localize brain areas involved with theory of mind (ToM) processing
In Study 4, we investigated the relationship between the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ), EQ, the geometrical figures task and compared the effects of these mechanisms in predicting religiosity to the role of Credibility Enhancing Displays scale (CREDs) in a preregistered study with US participants

Summary

Introduction

At least 80% of the world population believes in intentional supernatural agents [1]. 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 [2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. This is the ability to attribute intentions, beliefs, and desires to other minds [18,19]. We predicted that autistic people would overall attribute less intentionality to videos of the GFT, but that this would be especially evident in the videos in which intentionality was present

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion