Abstract
The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a “religious” or a “fictional” agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous–violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge–and fewer abilities that violated folk physics and biology. Similarly, participants rated folk psychology violations provided by the experimenter as more characteristic of religious agents than were violations of folk physics or folk biology, while fictional agents showed no clear pattern. Religious agents were also judged as more potentially beneficial, and more ambivalent (i.e., similar ratings of benefit and harm), than fictional agents, regardless of whether the agents were invented or well-known to participants. Together, the results support a motivational account of religious belief formation that is facilitated by these biases.
Highlights
The domain of counterintuitive agents includes all manner of gods, goddesses, superheroes, and cartoon characters with abilities and features that violate our intuitive or ‘folk’ expectations about the world [1]
141 participants chose 702 abilities for religious agents, and 145 participants chose 725 abilities for fictional agents
The abilities participants chose were coded by the first author and a hypothesis-blind research assistant in terms of whether they (1) exclusively violated folk psychology, (2) exclusively violated folk biology, (3) exclusively violated folk physics, (4) violated nonspecific or multiple folk domains, or (5) violated none of the domains
Summary
The domain of counterintuitive agents includes all manner of gods, goddesses, superheroes, and cartoon characters with abilities and features that violate our intuitive or ‘folk’ expectations about the world [1]. For example, violate the ‘folk physics’ expectation that objects cannot be in several places at once. An immortal superhero violates the ‘folk biology’ expectation that all living things die. A talking mouse violates the ‘folk psychology’ expectation that animals cannot use language. These intuitive expectations about the features and behaviors of stimuli from various ontological categories (i.e., objects, living things, animals) are described as maturationally natural because they appear early in development and across cultural contexts [2,3,4]. We implicitly apply them to our environment, such that any counterintuitive agent that violates them is likely to attract attention
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