Rational reasons for irrational beliefs.

According to many, we live in "posttruth" times, with the pervasiveness of falsehoods being an existential threat to democracy and the functioning of free societies. Why do people believe and propagate falsehoods? Current accounts focus on psychological deficiencies, heuristic errors, self-enhancing motivations, and motivations to sow chaos. Here, we advance a complementary, outwardly (vs. inwardly) oriented, and ultimate (vs. proximate) account that people often believe and spread falsehoods for socially functional reasons. Under this view, falsehoods can serve as rare and valued information with which to rise in prestige, as signals of group commitment and loyalty tests, as ammunition with which to derogate rivals, or as outrages with which to mobilize the group toward shared goals. Thus, although people often generate and defend falsehoods through processes that are epistemically irrational, doing so might be rational from the perspective of the functions falsehoods serve. We discuss the implications of this view for puzzling theoretical phenomena and changing problematic beliefs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India.

Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extraordinary abilities, and/or psychopathology offer an important site for investigating the interplay of mind and culture at the population level. However, the difficulties inherent in comparing culture-laden experiences, exacerbated by the siloing of research on experiences based on discipline-specific theoretical constructs, have limited our ability to do so. We introduce the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE), which allows researchers to compare experiences by separating the phenomenological features from how they are appraised and asking about both. It thereby offers a new means of investigating the potentially universal (etic) and culture-specific (emic) aspects of lived experiences. To ensure that the INOE survey items are understood as intended by English speakers in the US and Hindi speakers in India, and thus can serve as a basis for cross-cultural comparison, we used the Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method to collect evidence of item-level validity. Our inability to validate some items drawn from other surveys suggests that they are capturing a wider range of experiences than researchers intend. Wider use of the RPE method would increase the likelihood that survey results are due to the differences that researchers intend to measure.

How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology?

How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values and norms) drawn from the EcoCultural Dataset. We generate a range of estimates by using different statistical metrics (e.g. current levels, average levels across time, unpredictability across time) of each of the ecological variables. Our results suggest that, on average, ecology explains a substantial amount of human cultural variation above and beyond spatial and cultural autocorrelation. The amount of variation explained depended on the metrics used, with current levels and average levels of ecological conditions explaining the greatest amounts of variance in human culture on average (16% and 20%, respectively).

A feature-based approach to the comparative study of "nonordinary" experiences.

At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such "nonordinary experiences" (NOEs) was never fully realized due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today, psychologists tend to reify constructs, such as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (e.g., psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and psychopathological. In doing so, they face an unresolved challenge: experiences with phenomenologically distinct features may be appraised similarly within a culture (i.e., viewed as evidence for the same culturally specific construct) and experiences that share phenomenological features may be appraised differently across cultures. Here, we call for a renewed approach to comparing NOEs across cultures that prioritizes subjectively recognizable features instead of constructs. First, we review the history of the comparative approach in psychology and where it is today. Second, we introduce a feature-based approach, building on the event cognition literature, in which "lived experiences" are broken down into their phenomenological features and the claims made about them. Third, we propose ways in which cultural learning shapes experiences, and possibly the ordinary-nonordinary distinction itself. We conclude by highlighting that by building on and shifting the focus of previous efforts, the feature-based approach provides a way to compare experiences at the population level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Ecology-Culture Dataset: A new resource for investigating cultural variation.

Scholars interested in cultural diversity have long suggested that similarities and differences across human populations might be understood, at least in part, as stemming from differences in the social and physical ecologies individuals inhabit. Here, we describe the EcoCultural Dataset (ECD), the most comprehensive compilation to date of country-level ecological and cultural variables around the globe. ECD covers 220 countries, 9 ecological variables operationalized by 11 statistical metrics (including measures of variability and predictability), and 72 cultural variables (including values, personality traits, fundamental social motives, subjective well-being, tightness-looseness, indices of corruption, social capital, and gender inequality). This rich dataset can be used to identify novel relationships between ecological and cultural variables, to assess the overall relationship between ecology and culture, to explore the consequences of interactions between different ecological variables, and to construct new indices of cultural distance.

Causal Judgment in the Wild: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

When explaining why an event occurred, people intuitively highlight some causes while ignoring others. How do people decide which causes to select? Models of causal judgment have been evaluated in simple and controlled laboratory experiments, but they have yet to be tested in a complex real-world setting. Here, we provide such a test, in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Across tens of thousands of simulations of possible election outcomes, we computed, for each state, an adjusted measure of the correlation between a Biden victory in that state and a Biden election victory. These effect size measures accurately predicted the extent to which U.S. participants (N = 207, preregistered) viewed victory in a given state as having caused Biden to win the presidency. Our findings support the theory that people intuitively select as causes of an outcome the factors with the largest standardized causal effect on that outcome across possible counterfactual worlds.

Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?

Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk psychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folk physics (for representing the properties of objects) but are said to apply only folk psychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence purportedly make it natural for people of all ages to entertain beliefs in disembodied minds. We critically evaluate this thesis. We integrate studies of both children and adults on representations of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, beliefs about the afterlife and souls, mind transfer, body duplication, and body transplantation. We show that representations of minds and bodies are integrated from the start, that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages but develop slowly, and that early-acquired conceptions of religious beings as embodied are not revised by theological conceptions of such beings as disembodied. We argue that belief in disembodied beings requires cultural learning-a learned dualism. We conclude by suggesting that disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain them but because they are counterintuitive and thus have a social transmission advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

She told me about a singing cactus: Counterintuitive concepts are more accurately attributed to their speakers than ordinary concepts.

Communication is central to human life, yet it leaves humans vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Humans have therefore evolved a suite of psychological mechanisms for the evaluation of speakers and their messages. Here, we test a key hypothesized function of these "epistemic vigilance" mechanisms: the selective remembering of links between speakers and messages that are inconsistent with preexisting beliefs. Across four experiments, participants (N = 707) read stories associated with different contexts, with each story containing concepts that violate core knowledge intuitions ("counterintuitive concepts") and ordinary concepts. Experiment 1 revealed that after a brief distractor (2 min) participants more accurately attributed counterintuitive concepts to their speakers than ordinary concepts. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated this finding and found that this attribution accuracy advantage also extended to counterintuitive versus ordinary concepts associated with other contextual details-places and dates. Experiment 3 then tested whether this attribution accuracy advantage was more stable over time for speakers than for places. After a short distractor (20 min), there was a counterintuitive versus ordinary concept attribution accuracy advantage for both speakers and places. However, when participants were tested again after a long delay (48 hr), this attribution accuracy advantage more than doubled for speakers but disappeared entirely for places. We discuss the implications of these findings to the set of psychological mechanisms theorized to monitor and evaluate communication to guard our database of beliefs about the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Family Matters: Rethinking the Psychology of Human Social Motivation.

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thoroughly connected to relevant comparative and evolutionary work on other species, and in the case of kin care, these bonds have been less well researched. Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. Compared with other groups, college students, single people, and men place relatively higher emphasis on mate seeking, but even those samples rated kin-care motives as more important. Furthermore, motives linked to long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals. Reallocating relatively greater research effort toward long-term familial relationships would likely yield many interesting new findings relevant to everyday people's highest social priorities.

The Embodied God: Core Intuitions About Person Physicality Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus.

Why are disembodied extraordinary beings like gods and spirits prevalent in past and present theologies? Under the intuitive Cartesian dualism hypothesis, this is because it is natural to conceptualize of minds as separate from bodies; under the counterintuitiveness hypothesis, this is because beliefs in minds without bodies are unnatural-such beliefs violate core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and consequently have a social transmission advantage. We report on a critical test of these contrasting hypotheses. Prior research found that among adult Christian religious adherents, intuitions about person psychology coexist and interfere with theological conceptualizations of God (e.g., infallibility). Here, we use a sentence verification paradigm where participants are asked to evaluate as true or false statements on which core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and psychology and Christian theology about God are inconsistent (true on one and false on the other) versus consistent (both true or both false). We find, as predicted by the counterintuitiveness hypothesis but not the Cartesian dualism hypothesis, that Christian religious adherents show worse performance (lower accuracy and slower response time) on statements where Christian theological doctrines about God's physicality (e.g., incorporeality, omnipresence) conflict with intuitions about person physicality. We find these effects for other extraordinary beings in Christianity-the Holy Spirit and Jesus-but not for an ordinary being (priest). We conclude that it is unintuitive to conceptualize extraordinary beings as disembodied, and that this, rather than inherent Cartesian dualism, may explain the prevalence of beliefs in such beings.

Representational coexistence in the God concept: Core knowledge intuitions of God as a person are not revised by Christian theology despite lifelong experience.

Previous research has shown that in the minds of young adult religious adherents, acquired theology about the extraordinary characteristics of God (e.g., omniscience) coexists with, rather than replaces, an initial concept of God formed by co-option of the person concept. We tested the hypothesis that representational coexistence holds even after extensive experience with Christian theology, as indexed by age. Christian religious adherents ranging in age from 18 to 87 years were asked to evaluate as true or false statements on which core knowledge intuitions about persons and Christian theology about God were consistent (both true or both false) or inconsistent (true on one and false on the other). Results showed, across adulthood, more theological errors in evaluating inconsistent versus consistent statements. Older adults also exhibited slower response times to inconsistent versus consistent statements. These findings show that despite extensive experience, indeed a lifetime of experience for some participants, the Christian theological God concept does not separate from the initial person concept from which it is formed. In fact, behavioral signatures of representational coexistence were not attenuated by experience. We discuss the broader implications of these findings to the acquisition of evolutionarily new concepts.

Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God.

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., "God has beliefs that are true"] or false according to both [e.g., "All beliefs God has are false"]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., "God has beliefs that are false"] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., "All beliefs God has are true"]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God-a supernatural religious entity-but not for a natural religious entity (a priest).