The Role of Implicit and Explicit Beliefs in Grave-Good Practices: Evidence for Intuitive Afterlife Reasoning.

The practice of burying objects with the dead is often claimed as some of the earliest evidence for religion, on the assumption that such "grave goods" were intended for the decedents' use in the afterlife. However, this assumption is largely speculative, as the underlying motivations for grave-good practices across time and place remain little understood. In the present work, we asked if explicit and implicit religious beliefs (particularly those concerning the continuity of personal consciousness after death) motivate contemporary grave-good practices. Across three studies, and comparing participants from the United States and NZ, we measured grave-good deposition at actual or hypothetical funerals, finding that jewelry, photographs, and other items with sentimental, emotional, and relationship value were common. In addition, intuitive afterlife reasoning (as measured by people's attributions of mental states to the dead) motivated grave-good decision-making for about half (Study 2) or more (Study 3) people, including afterlife nonbelievers ("extinctivists"), while those who held explicit (i.e., stated) afterlife beliefs were more likely to participate in the practice. The decision to leave grave goods was also associated with magical contagion beliefs and a need for personal comfort, while other motivations, such as social signaling, were less common. Our results suggest that "afterlife use" is a common motivation for grave-good practices, and that humans possess evolutionarily early intuitions about postdeath consciousness.

WireSafeTM - A pilot study of a novel safety engineered device designed to prevent guidewire retention and reduce sharps injuries during central venous catheter insertion.

Background: Guidewire retention and sharps injury during central venous catheter insertion are errors that cause patient and healthcare professional harm. The WireSafeTM is a novel procedure safety pack engineered to prevent guidewire retention and sharps injury during central venous catheter insertion. This is a pilot study aimed to determine its acceptability, usability and safety during clinical practice. Methods: An observational time and motion study was conducted comparing central venous catheter insertion and sharps disposal practice using standard versus WireSafeTM techniques. One-year following implementation, a structured survey was conducted to determine clinician opinion and experiences of using the WireSafeTM. Results: 15 procedures were observed using standard practice and 16 using the WireSafeTM technique. The WireSafeTM technique decreased the time taken from removal of the guidewire to disposal of sharps (standard 11.4 ± 5.6 min vs WireSafeTM 8.7 ± 1.4 min, p = 0.035), as well as total procedure time (standard 16 ± 7 min vs WireSafeTM 14.2 ± 2 min, p = 0.17), although this latter trend did not reach significance. Clinicians frequently practiced unsafe behaviour during sharps disposal in the standard group (53%), but when using the WireSafeTM technique, 100% exhibited safe practice by transferring sharps to the bin inside the sealed WireSafeTM box. One-year following implementation, 20 clinicians participated in the structured survey. Clinicians across three different departments used the WireSafeTM in varying clinical situations and reported that its use for central line insertion was either easier (10/20) or no different (10/20) compared to standard practice. All clinicians (20/20) felt that the WireSafeTM reduced the risk of guidewire retention and all stated that they approved of the WireSafeTM technique, and supported its use for convenience and safety benefits. Conclusion: Utilising the WireSafeTM for central line insertion facilitated earlier and safer sharps disposal, and the device was well supported by clinicians for its convenience and safety benefits.

The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents.

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.