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

Belief in belief: Even atheists in secular countries show intuitive preferences favoring religious belief

We find evidence of belief in belief-intuitive preferences for religious belief over atheism, even among atheist participants-across eight comparatively secular countries. Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, yet explicit markers of religiosity have rapidly waned in large parts of the world in recent decades. We explored whether intuitive religious influence lingers, even among nonbelievers in largely secular societies. We adapted a classic experimental philosophy task to test for this intuitive belief in belief among people in eight comparatively nonreligious countries: Canada, China, Czechia, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam (total N = 3,804). Our analyses revealed strong evidence that 1) people intuitively favor religious belief over atheism and that 2) this pattern was not moderated by participants' own self-reported atheism. Indeed, 3) even atheists in relatively secular societies intuitively prefer belief to atheism. These inferences were robust across different analytic strategies and across other measures of individual differences in religiosity and religious instruction. Although explicit religious belief has rapidly declined in these countries, it is possible that belief in belief may still persist. These results speak to the complex psychological and cultural dynamics of secularization.

Prevalence, patterns and predictors of paranormal beliefs in The Netherlands: a several-analysts approach

Paranormal beliefs encompass a wide variety of phenomena, including the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and witches, as well as extraordinary human abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance. In the current study, we used a nationally representative sample ( N = 2534 ) to investigate the presence and correlates of paranormal beliefs among the secular Dutch population. The results indicated that most single paranormal phenomena (e.g. belief in clairvoyance) are endorsed by 10-20% of Dutch respondents; however, 55.6% of respondents qualify as paranormal believers based on the preregistered criterion that they believe in at least one phenomenon with considerable certainty. In addition, we invited four analysis teams with different methodological expertise to assess the structure of paranormal beliefs using traditional factor analysis, network analysis, Bayesian network analysis and latent class analysis (LCA). The teams' analyses indicated adequate fit of a four-factor structure reported in a 1985 study, but also emphasized different conclusions across techniques; network analyses showed evidence against strong connectedness within most clusters, and suggested a five-cluster structure. The application of various analytic techniques painted a nuanced picture of paranormal beliefs and believers in The Netherlands and suggests that despite increased secularization, subgroups of the general population still believe in paranormal phenomena.

Cultural transmission and religious belief: An extended replication of Gervais and Najle (2015) using data from the International Social Survey Programme

Beliefs in supernatural agents or religious beliefs are pervasive, yet there are individual differences in such beliefs. Although various factors have been proposed as relevant, recent research has increasingly emphasized the importance of cultural learning, showing that enthusiastic religious behavior (credibility enhancing displays; CREDs) from parents predicts increased religious beliefs among their children. In addition to this kin-biased learning, Gervais and Najle (2015) analyzed data from the World Values Survey to demonstrate that the number of adults who show religious CREDs is also an important predictor of people's beliefs, indicating that individuals develop their religious beliefs through conformist learning. This pre-registration study aimed to replicate and extend these findings by analyzing data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which is another large social survey. We examined the generalizability of the results by analyzing multigenerational samples. Multilevel regression and signal detection analyses revealed that the presence of both kin-biased and conformist learning cues was significantly associated with respondents' religious beliefs. Moreover, they suggested tension between the two cultural learning cues, thereby suggesting that the effect of kin-biased learning on religious beliefs becomes stronger (weaker) when the cue for conformist learning is unclear (clear). These results support the idea that these two types of cultural learning are crucial to the development of religious beliefs.

The Intersection of Faith and Neurodiversity: Unraveling Religiosity in Autistic Adolescents-A Critical Review Analysis

This literature review aims to explore religiosity, faith, and related beliefs in autistic adolescents. The term religiosity was used interchangeably with various related concepts such as faith, spirituality, and religious beliefs, and a broader, multifaceted approach encompassing the cognitive, subjective, social, cultural, and emotional domains of religiosity is analyzed in this population subgroup. In alignment with the neurodiversity paradigm, this review endeavors to adopt an inclusive lens toward autism spectrum conditions, appreciating the spectrum of cognitive and behavioral differences and highlighting the importance of recognizing strengths and challenges alike, reflecting the nuanced discourse surrounding neurodiversity and autism spectrum conditions. However, terms such as "high-functioning autism" and "disorder" were used where needed to reflect the journals included in the review. A systematic search was conducted by accessing academic search engines such as APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles, APA PsycTests, and PubMed. Only peer-reviewed articles written in English and performed on human subjects were included using strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. Several recurring themes were identified from the 13 articles selected after review for relevance and quality. The most important finding was the association of different terminologies and features while exploring "religiosity in autism." Thirty-nine key themes were identified, which were grouped into six major themes. These were religious faith, spirituality, and its expression in autistic adolescents; religious behaviors and practices of autistic adolescents; cognition and religion in autistic teens; social and cultural influences on religiosity in autistic young ones; parents' and carers' influence, perspectives, and experiences about faith and spirituality on autistic adolescents; and perceived benefits of faith to autistic teens: parents and adolescent perspectives. Looking at the concept of religiosity and spirituality as a whole, it can be inferred from the available research included in this review that religiosity (cognitive abilities, behaviors, and experiences) in a subset of autistic adolescents (high-functioning autism) might not be significantly subdued as compared to neurotypical adolescents. However, there is not enough research to conclude the same or the opposite for autistic adolescents in general. When found, reserved religiosity could be attributed to a plethora of factors, and decreased mental ability or mentalization, empathy, or imagination did not seem to be the sole or primary predictors or contributors to religiosity. The role of culture, parents, carers, and religious affiliations was significant and might be a stronger contributor to religiosity and its expression than other previously argued predictors like mentalization. Many autistic teens and their carers regard religiosity and spirituality as essential domains in their and their children's lives, want their children to be given opportunities to be a part of religious groups and affiliations, and look forward to government, religious, and healthcare authorities actively supporting them in this domain. The findings call for policymakers, religious leaders, and stakeholders to devise strategies for inclusion and support for autistic adolescents. The possible role of religion as a resource and coping strategy for these children and their families is worth exploring.

Children's beliefs in invisible causal agents-Both religious and scientific

Against the proposal that children have a natural disposition for supernatural or religious beliefs, we review the decades-old evidence showing that children typically invoke naturalistic causes-even in the face of unusual outcomes. Instead, we propose that children's tendency to endorse supernatural agents reflects their capacity for cultural learning rather than an inherent inclination to believe in divine powers. We support this argument by reviewing the findings that religious exposure in childhood, not individual cognitive or personality factors, is the major determinant of religiosity in adulthood. We highlight the role of cultural learning in children's endorsement of invisible divine agents by drawing on cross-cultural evidence that children are equally receptive to claims regarding the existence of invisible natural agents. We end by introducing a hypothesis to explain how children come to endorse religious beliefs despite their bias toward naturalistic explanation.

Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind

According to the predictive-processing framework, only prediction errors (rather than all sensory inputs) are processed by an organism's perceptual system. Prediction errors can be weighted such that errors from more reliable sources will be more influential in updating prior beliefs. It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism. The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input? In this article I argue that evidence strongly supports this hypothesis. An inflexibly low weight given to sensory input can explain such disparate features of positive schizotypy as increased exploratory behavior, apophenia, hyper theory of mind, hyperactive imagination, attentional differences, and having idiosyncratic worldviews.

Credibility Enhancing Displays, religious scandal and the decline of Irish Catholic orthodoxy

Credibility Enhancing Displays have been shown to be an important component in the transmission of empirically unverifiable cultural content such as religious beliefs. Decreased Credibility Enhancing Displays are a major predictor of religious decline. However, because declines in belief are often paired with the decreasing importance of religious institutions, existing research has not yet shown the effect of Credibility Enhancing Displays as separate from this institutional decline. Here, we assess the role of past Credibility Enhancing Display exposure among the baptised Catholic population of Ireland in predicting who retains a Catholic identity and religious beliefs among those who reject the Catholic Church. We find that leaving Catholicism outright (i.e. 'ex-Catholicism') is predicted by low Credibility Enhancing Display exposure, but rejecting the Church while retaining a Catholic identity (i.e. 'liminal Catholicism') and theistic belief is not. High perceived prevalence of clerical paedophiles (i.e. religious hypocrisy) predicts both groups similarly. Higher exposure to Credibility Enhancing Displays predicts higher orthodox Catholic beliefs and Catholic morality among Catholics, but with inconsistent and even negative effects among the other groups. High perceived prevalence of clerical paedophiles predicts the rejection of orthodox Catholic beliefs, but not the rejection of theism or a Catholic identity.

The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality

There is a widespread cross-cultural stereotype suggesting that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. Is there any truth to this notion? Building on theory about the cultural, (de)motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, the present research investigated whether there are reliable similarities as well as differences between believers and disbelievers in the moral values and principles they endorse. Four studies examined how religious disbelief (vs. belief) relates to endorsement of various moral values and principles in a predominately religious (vs. irreligious) country (the U.S. vs. Sweden). Two U.S. M-Turk studies (Studies 1A and 1B, N = 429) and two large cross-national studies (Studies 2-3, N = 4,193), consistently show that disbelievers (vs. believers) are less inclined to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion (the binding moral foundations). By contrast, only minor differences between believers and disbelievers were found in endorsement of other moral values (individualizing moral foundations, epistemic rationality). It is also demonstrated that presumed cultural and demotivational antecedents of disbelief (limited exposure to credibility-enhancing displays, low existential threat) are associated with disbelief. Furthermore, these factors are associated with weaker endorsement of the binding moral foundations in both countries (Study 2). Most of these findings were replicated in Study 3, and results also show that disbelievers (vs. believers) have a more consequentialist view of morality in both countries. A consequentialist view of morality was also associated with another presumed antecedent of disbelief-analytic cognitive style.

Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God

Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross-culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God-an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma-another culturally widespread but ostensibly non-agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high-powered samples, including mostly Christian Canadians and mostly Hindu Indians (Study 1, N = 2,006) and mostly Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists (Study 2, N = 1,752), we provide the first systematic empirical investigation of the cognitive intuitions underlying various forms of belief in karma. We used path analyses to (a) replicate tests of the previously documented cognitive predictors of belief in God, (b) test whether this same network of variables predicts belief in karma, and (c) examine the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural variables to both sets of beliefs. We found that cognitive tendencies toward intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism, and teleological thinking predicted a variety of beliefs about karma-including morally laden, non-agentic, and agentic conceptualizations-above and beyond the variability explained by cultural learning about karma across cultures. These results provide further evidence for an independent role for both culture and cognition in supporting diverse types of supernatural beliefs in distinct cultural contexts.

The psychology of nonbelievers

Contrary to some conceptualizations, nonbelievers are more than simply those scoring low on religiosity scales. They seem to be characterized by analytic, flexible, and open-minded social-cognitive attributes, although this may interact with sociocultural levels of religiosity. This paper demonstrates that nonbelief, at least in the West, tends to coincide with specific worldviews, namely valuing rationality and science, as well as humanistic and liberal values. Furthermore, nonbelievers seem to parallel believers in various indicators of health. Finally, as all ideologists, nonbelievers may hold prejudicial attitudes toward groups perceived as threatening their (secular) worldviews, although this has some limits. Global increases in secularity make the nascent psychological study of nonbelievers and nonreligious worldviews an important research programme.

How cultural learning and cognitive biases shape religious beliefs

What explains the ubiquity and diversity of religions around the world? Widespread cognitive tendencies, including mentalizing and intuitive thinking, offer part of the explanation for recurrent features of religion, and individual differences in religious commitments. However, vast diversity in religious beliefs points to the importance of the cultural context in which religious beliefs are transmitted. Cultural evolutionary theory provides the basis of a unified explanation for how cognition and culture interact to shape religious beliefs, in ways that are uniquely adapted to local ecological pressures. These insights lay the groundwork for future research regarding how cultural learning interacts with other evolved aspects of human psychology to generate the recurrent and the diverse forms of religious commitments observed around the world.

Religious belief and cognitive conflict sensitivity: A preregistered fMRI study

In the current preregistered fMRI study, we investigated the relationship between religiosity and behavioral and neural mechanisms of conflict processing, as a conceptual replication of the study by Inzlicht et al., (2009). Participants (N=193) performed a gender-Stroop task and afterwards completed standardized measures to assess their religiosity. As expected, the task induced cognitive conflict at the behavioral level and at a neural level this was reflected in increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, individual differences in religiosity were not related to performance on the Stroop task as measured in accuracy and interference effects, nor to neural markers of response conflict (correct responses vs. errors) or informational conflict (congruent vs. incongruent stimuli). Overall, we obtained moderate to strong evidence in favor of the null hypotheses that religiosity is unrelated to cognitive conflict sensitivity. We discuss the implications for the neuroscience of religion and emphasize the importance of designing studies that more directly implicate religious concepts and behaviors in an ecologically valid manner.

Belief formation - A driving force for brain evolution

The topic of belief has been neglected in the natural sciences for a long period of time. Recent neuroscience research in non-human primates and humans, however, has shown that beliefs are the neuropsychic product of fundamental brain processes that attribute affective meaning to concrete objects and events, enabling individual goal setting, decision making and maneuvering in the environment. With regard to the involved neural processes they can be categorized as empirical, relational, and conceptual beliefs. Empirical beliefs are about objects and relational beliefs are about events as in tool use and in interactions between subjects that develop below the level of awareness and are up-dated dynamically. Conceptual beliefs are more complex being based on narratives and participation in ritual acts. As neural processes are known to require computational space in the brain, the formation of inceasingly complex beliefs demands extra neural resources. Here, we argue that the evolution of human beliefs is related to the phylogenetic enlargement of the brain including the parietal and medial frontal cortex in humans.

The relationship between individual differences in gray matter volume and religiosity and mystical experiences: A preregistered voxel-based morphometry study

The neural substrates of religious belief and experience are an intriguing though contentious topic. Here, we had the unique opportunity to establish the relation between validated measures of religiosity and gray matter volume in a large sample of participants (N = 211). In this registered report, we conducted a confirmatory voxel-based morphometry analysis to test three central hypotheses regarding the relationship between religiosity and mystical experiences and gray matter volume. The preregisterered hypotheses, analysis plan, preprocessing and analysis code and statistical brain maps are all available from online repositories. By using a region-of-interest analysis, we found no evidence that religiosity is associated with a reduced volume of the orbito-frontal cortex and changes in the structure of the bilateral inferior parietal lobes. Neither did we find support for the notion that mystical experiences are associated with a reduced volume of the hippocampus, the right middle temporal gyrus or with the inferior parietal lobes. A whole-brain analysis furthermore indicated that no structural brain differences were found in association with religiosity and mystical experiences. We believe that the search for the neural correlates of religious beliefs and experiences should therefore shift focus from studying structural brain differences to a functional and multivariate approach.

Cognitive Biases and Religious Belief: A Path Model Replication in the Czech Republic and Slovakia With a Focus on Anthropomorphism

We examined cognitive biases that underlie individual differences in supernatural beliefs in nationally representative samples from the Czech Republic and Slovakia (total N = 2,022). These countries were chosen because of their differing levels of religious belief despite their cultural similarity. Replicating a previous study with North American samples, we found that anthropomorphism was unrelated to belief in God but was consistently related to paranormal beliefs. Living in a highly religious area was related to a lower tendency to anthropomorphize. We examined this relationship further to find that anthropomorphism was related to belief in God for nonreligious participants, was inversely related to belief in God among religious Slovaks, and not related for religious Czechs. These findings suggest that anthropomorphism predicts belief in God for people who are unaffiliated, but this relationship disappears or is reversed for religious believers participating in a Christian religious tradition.