Supernatural believers attribute more intentions to random movement than skeptics: An fMRI study

Abstract

A host of research has attempted to explain why some believe in the supernatural and some do not. One suggested explanation for commonly held supernatural beliefs is that they are a by-product of theory of mind (ToM) processing. However, this does not explain why skeptics with intact ToM processes do not believe. We employed fMRI to investigate activation differences in ToM-related brain circuitries between supernatural believers (N = 12) and skeptics (N = 11) while they watched 2D animations of geometric objects moving intentionally or randomly and rated the intentionality of the animations. The ToM-related circuitries in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were localized by contrasting intention-rating-related and control-rating-related brain activation. Compared with the skeptics, the supernatural believers rated the random movements as more intentional and had stronger activation of the ToM-related circuitries during the animation with random movement. The strength of the ToM-related activation covaried with the intentionality ratings. These findings provide evidence that differences in ToM-related activations are associated with supernatural believers’ tendency to interpret random phenomena in mental terms. Thus, differences in ToM processing may contribute to differences between believing and unbelieving.

Keywords:

• Supernatural beliefs
• Theory of mind
• Intentionality
• fMRI

We would like to thank Matti Skants for his technical support.

This study was supported by a grant from the Research Funds of the University of Helsinki awarded to Marjaana Lindeman and by the National Centers of Excellence Programme 2006–2011 and the European Research Council Advanced Grant [grant number 232946] to Riitta Hari.