Priming with Religion and Supernatural Agency Enhances the Perception of Intentionality in Natural Phenomena
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jcsr.v2i2.24483Keywords:
religion, agency detection, supernatural agency, natural phenomena, control, intentionalityAbstract
Cognitive theories of religion suggest that belief in supernatural agents finds a basis in the human tendency to (over) detect agency in the environment. The present research investigated whether activation of religious concepts enhances the attribution of agency in natural phenomena. In two experiments we administered a religion prime (a religion questionnaire in Experiment 1; a subliminal God prime in Experiment 2) and measured the amount of intentionality and free will that participants ascribed to images of natural phenomena and agents. In both experiments participants ascribed more agency to natural phenomena if they had been presented with a religion prime. Item analyses for both experiments furthermore revealed that the effect of religious priming was most pronounced for items of natural phenomena that were perceived as beyond personal control. These findings provide empirical support for the hypothesized relation between religion and agency detection.
References
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———. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
———. 2005. “The empathizing system.” In Origins of the social mind: Evolutionary psychology and child development, edited by Bruce J. Ellis, David F. Bjorklund, 468–492. London: Routledge.
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———. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Oxford: AltaMira Press.
———. and A. H. Johnson. 2003. “The role of control in attributing intentional agency to inanimate objects.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 3(3): 208–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853703322336634
———. and J. A. Lanman. 2008. “The science of religious beliefs.” Religion 38: 109–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.religion.2008.01.007
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Blakemore, S. and J. Decety. 2001. “From the perception of action to the understanding of intention.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2(8): 561–567.
Bloom, P. and C. Veres. 1999. “The perceived intentionality of groups.” Cognition 71(1): B1–B9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00014-1
Bering, J. M. 2002. “The existential theory of mind.” Review of General Psychology 6(1): 3–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.6.1.3
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———. and B. Bergstrom. 2008. “Evolutionary perspectives on religion.” Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 111–130. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085201
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———. 2013. “Early cognitive theories of religion.” In Mental Culture: Classical Social theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, edited by D. Xygalatas and W. McCorkle, 33–51. London: Acumen.
———., J. Agassi, K. R. Andriolo, D. Buchdahl, H. B. Earhart, M. Greenberg and
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Karremans, J. C., W. Stroebe and J. Claus. 2006. “Beyond Vicary’s fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42(6): 792–798. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.002
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———., D. Gaucher, J. L. Napier, M. J. Callan and K. Laurin. 2008. “God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95: 18–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.1.18
———., J. A. Whitson, D. Gaucher and A. D. Galinsky. 2009. “Compensatory control achieving order through the mind, our institutions, and the heavens.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18(5): 264–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01649.x
Kelemen, D. 2004. “Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature.” Psychological Science 15(5): 295–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00672.x
Keltner, D. and J. Haidt. 2003. “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 17(2): 297–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
Lang, P. J., M. M. Bradley and B. N. Cuthbert. 2008. International affective picture system (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual. Technical Report A-8. Gainesville: University of Florida.
Laurin, K., A. C. Kay and D. M. Moscovitch. 2008. “On the belief in God: Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44: 1559–1562. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.07.007
LeDoux, J. E. 1996. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Leslie, A. M. 1995. “A theory of agency.” In Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, edited by D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack, 121–149. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Lindeman, M. and A. M. Svedholm. 2012. “What’s in a term? Paranormal, superstitious, magical and supernatural beliefs by any other name would mean the same.” Review of General Psychology 16(3): 241–255. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027158
Lisdorf, A. 2007. “What’s HIDD’n in the HADD?” Journal of Cognition and Culture 7(3): 341–353. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853707X208549
McCurry, J. 2011. “Tokyo governor apologises for calling tsunami ‘divine punishment’: Shintaro Ishihara said tsunami was retribution for ‘egoism’ of Japanese people.” The Guardian, March 15. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/tokyo-governor-tsunami-punishment.
Norenzayan, A., W. M. Gervais and K. H. Trzesniewski. 2012. “Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal God.” PLoS ONE 7(5): e36880. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036880
Öhman, A. 1996. “Preferential preattentive processing of threat in anxiety: preparedness and attentional biases.” In Current Controversies in the Anxiety Disorders, edited by R. M. Rapee, 253–290. New York: Guilford Press.
Orne, M. T. 1962. “On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: With particular reference to demand characteristics and their implications.” American Psychologist 17(11): 776–783. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0043424
Premack, D. 1990. “The infant’s theory of self-propelled objects.” Cognition 36: 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(90)90051-K
Preston, J. L., R. S. Ritter and J. I. Hernandez. 2010. “Principles of religious prosociality: A review and reformulation.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4(8): 574–590. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00286.x
Richert, R. A., and E. I. Smith. 2009. “Cognitive foundations in the development of a religious mind.” In The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior, edited by Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhövel, 181–193. Springer: Berlin. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00128-4_12
Schjoedt, U., H. Stødkilde-Jørgensen, A. W. Geertz and A. Roepstorff. 2009. “Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 4(2): 199–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn050
Scholl, B. J. and P. D. Tremoulet. 2000. “Perceptual causality and animacy.” Trends in Cognitive . Sciences 4(8): 299–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01506-0
Shiota, M. N., D. Keltner and A. Mossman. 2007. “The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept.” Cognition and Emotion 21(5): 944–963. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699930600923668
Sibley, C. G. and J. Bulbulia. 2012. “Faith after an earthquake: A longitudinal study of religion and perceived health before and after the 2011 Christchurch New Zealand earthquake.” PloS one 7(12): e49648. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049648
Smith, R. 2010. “Pat Robertson: Haiti ‘Cursed’ After ‘Pact to the Devil’.” CBS News, January 13. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-12017-504083.html.
SPSS. 2003. SPSS Base 12.0 for Windows User’s Guide. Chicago, IL: SPSS Inc.
Tremlin, T. 2006. Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0195305345.001.0001
Tremoulet, P. D. and J. Feldman. 2000. “Perception of animacy from the motion of a single object.” Perception 29(8): 943–951. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p3101
Tylor, E. B 1872. “Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom.” The North American Review 114: 227–231.
Vail, K. E., Z. K. Rothschild, D. R. Weise, S. Solomon, T. Pyszczynski and J. Greenberg 2010. “A terror management analysis of the psychological functions of religion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14(1): 84–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1088868309351165
Valdesolo, P. and J. Graham. 2014. “Awe, uncertainty, and agency detection.” Psychological Science 25(1): 170–178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797613501884
van Elk, M., B. T. Rutjens, J. van der Pligt and F. van Harreveld. 2014. “Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection.” Religion, Brain and Behavior (ahead-of-print), 1–30.
Whitson J. A. and A. D. Galinsky. 2008. “Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception.” Science 322: 115–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1159845
Baron-Cohen, S. 1994. “How to build a baby that can read minds: Cognitive mechanisms in mindreading.” Cahiers de Psychology Cognitive/Current Psychology of Cognition 13(5): 513–552.
———. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
———. 2005. “The empathizing system.” In Origins of the social mind: Evolutionary psychology and child development, edited by Bruce J. Ellis, David F. Bjorklund, 468–492. London: Routledge.
Barrett, D. B., G. T. Kurian and T. M. Johnson. 2001. World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative study of churches and religions in the modern world, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Barrett, J. L. 2000. “Exploring the natural foundations of religion.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 29–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01419-9
———. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Oxford: AltaMira Press.
———. and A. H. Johnson. 2003. “The role of control in attributing intentional agency to inanimate objects.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 3(3): 208–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853703322336634
———. and J. A. Lanman. 2008. “The science of religious beliefs.” Religion 38: 109–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.religion.2008.01.007
Blakemore, S.-J., P. Boyer, M. Pachot-Clouard, A. Meltzoff, C. Segebarth and J. Decety. 2003. “The detection of contingency and animacy from simple animations in the human brain.” Cerebral Cortex 13(8): 837–844. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/13.8.837
Blakemore, S. and J. Decety. 2001. “From the perception of action to the understanding of intention.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2(8): 561–567.
Bloom, P. and C. Veres. 1999. “The perceived intentionality of groups.” Cognition 71(1): B1–B9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00014-1
Bering, J. M. 2002. “The existential theory of mind.” Review of General Psychology 6(1): 3–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.6.1.3
Boyer, P. 2003. “Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 119–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00031-7
———. and B. Bergstrom. 2008. “Evolutionary perspectives on religion.” Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 111–130. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085201
Brüne, M. and U. Brüne-Cohrs. 2006. “Theory of mind—evolution, ontogeny, brain mechanisms and psychopathology.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30(4): 437–455. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.08.001
Csibra, G., G. Gergely, S. Bíró, O. Koos and M. Brockbank. 1999. “Goal attribution without agency cues: the perception of ‘pure reason’ in infancy.” Cognition 72(3): 237–267. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00039-6
Guthrie, S. E. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. “Early cognitive theories of religion.” In Mental Culture: Classical Social theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, edited by D. Xygalatas and W. McCorkle, 33–51. London: Acumen.
———., J. Agassi, K. R. Andriolo, D. Buchdahl, H. B. Earhart, M. Greenberg and
G. Tissot. 1980. “A cognitive theory of religion” [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology 21(2): 181–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/202429
Han, S., L. Mao, X. Gu, Y. Zhu, J. Ge and Y. Ma. 2008. “Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing.” Social Neuroscience 3(1): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470910701469681
Haselton, M. G. and D. Nettle. 2006. “The paranoid optimist: an integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(1): 47–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3
Heider, F., and M. Simmel. 1944. “An experimental study of apparent behavior.” The American Journal of Psychology 57: 243–259. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1416950
Karremans, J. C., W. Stroebe and J. Claus. 2006. “Beyond Vicary’s fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42(6): 792–798. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.002
Kay, A. C., D. Gaucher, I. McGregor and K. Nash. 2010. “Religious belief as compensatory control.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14(1): 37–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1088868309353750
———., D. Gaucher, J. L. Napier, M. J. Callan and K. Laurin. 2008. “God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95: 18–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.1.18
———., J. A. Whitson, D. Gaucher and A. D. Galinsky. 2009. “Compensatory control achieving order through the mind, our institutions, and the heavens.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18(5): 264–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01649.x
Kelemen, D. 2004. “Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature.” Psychological Science 15(5): 295–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00672.x
Keltner, D. and J. Haidt. 2003. “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 17(2): 297–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
Lang, P. J., M. M. Bradley and B. N. Cuthbert. 2008. International affective picture system (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual. Technical Report A-8. Gainesville: University of Florida.
Laurin, K., A. C. Kay and D. M. Moscovitch. 2008. “On the belief in God: Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44: 1559–1562. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.07.007
LeDoux, J. E. 1996. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Leslie, A. M. 1995. “A theory of agency.” In Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, edited by D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack, 121–149. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Lindeman, M. and A. M. Svedholm. 2012. “What’s in a term? Paranormal, superstitious, magical and supernatural beliefs by any other name would mean the same.” Review of General Psychology 16(3): 241–255. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027158
Lisdorf, A. 2007. “What’s HIDD’n in the HADD?” Journal of Cognition and Culture 7(3): 341–353. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853707X208549
McCurry, J. 2011. “Tokyo governor apologises for calling tsunami ‘divine punishment’: Shintaro Ishihara said tsunami was retribution for ‘egoism’ of Japanese people.” The Guardian, March 15. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/tokyo-governor-tsunami-punishment.
Norenzayan, A., W. M. Gervais and K. H. Trzesniewski. 2012. “Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal God.” PLoS ONE 7(5): e36880. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036880
Öhman, A. 1996. “Preferential preattentive processing of threat in anxiety: preparedness and attentional biases.” In Current Controversies in the Anxiety Disorders, edited by R. M. Rapee, 253–290. New York: Guilford Press.
Orne, M. T. 1962. “On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: With particular reference to demand characteristics and their implications.” American Psychologist 17(11): 776–783. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0043424
Premack, D. 1990. “The infant’s theory of self-propelled objects.” Cognition 36: 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(90)90051-K
Preston, J. L., R. S. Ritter and J. I. Hernandez. 2010. “Principles of religious prosociality: A review and reformulation.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4(8): 574–590. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00286.x
Richert, R. A., and E. I. Smith. 2009. “Cognitive foundations in the development of a religious mind.” In The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior, edited by Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhövel, 181–193. Springer: Berlin. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00128-4_12
Schjoedt, U., H. Stødkilde-Jørgensen, A. W. Geertz and A. Roepstorff. 2009. “Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 4(2): 199–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn050
Scholl, B. J. and P. D. Tremoulet. 2000. “Perceptual causality and animacy.” Trends in Cognitive . Sciences 4(8): 299–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01506-0
Shiota, M. N., D. Keltner and A. Mossman. 2007. “The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept.” Cognition and Emotion 21(5): 944–963. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699930600923668
Sibley, C. G. and J. Bulbulia. 2012. “Faith after an earthquake: A longitudinal study of religion and perceived health before and after the 2011 Christchurch New Zealand earthquake.” PloS one 7(12): e49648. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049648
Smith, R. 2010. “Pat Robertson: Haiti ‘Cursed’ After ‘Pact to the Devil’.” CBS News, January 13. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-12017-504083.html.
SPSS. 2003. SPSS Base 12.0 for Windows User’s Guide. Chicago, IL: SPSS Inc.
Tremlin, T. 2006. Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0195305345.001.0001
Tremoulet, P. D. and J. Feldman. 2000. “Perception of animacy from the motion of a single object.” Perception 29(8): 943–951. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p3101
Tylor, E. B 1872. “Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom.” The North American Review 114: 227–231.
Vail, K. E., Z. K. Rothschild, D. R. Weise, S. Solomon, T. Pyszczynski and J. Greenberg 2010. “A terror management analysis of the psychological functions of religion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14(1): 84–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1088868309351165
Valdesolo, P. and J. Graham. 2014. “Awe, uncertainty, and agency detection.” Psychological Science 25(1): 170–178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797613501884
van Elk, M., B. T. Rutjens, J. van der Pligt and F. van Harreveld. 2014. “Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection.” Religion, Brain and Behavior (ahead-of-print), 1–30.
Whitson J. A. and A. D. Galinsky. 2008. “Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception.” Science 322: 115–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1159845
Published
2015-09-30
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Equinox Publishing Ltd.
How to Cite
Nieuwboer, W., van Schie, H. T., & Wigboldus, D. (2015). Priming with Religion and Supernatural Agency Enhances the Perception of Intentionality in Natural Phenomena. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2(2), 97-120. https://doi.org/10.1558/jcsr.v2i2.24483
