Theory of mind: The state of the art*

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on theory of mind as a field (ToM), how it has developed over the years, and focally on the state of current research and theory. Having begun with preschoolers’ understanding of beliefs and desires, the field now includes research from infancy through late life, contributions and contributors from around the world, research on behavior, conversation, neural correlates, gene-environment contributions, evolution, and the social-behavioral antecedents and consequences of the unfolding trajectories of ToM understanding. Several topics in particular portray the current state of the art and my sense of where theory-of-mind research is likely to head in the near future: progressions of theory of mind achievement; cultural experiences plus experiential influences that shape developmental trajectories; developmental cognitive neuroscience; infant ToM insights; research on ToM developments beyond preschool, including children’s increasing interest in and wrestling with extraordinary minds, such as those of God and super-heroes.     

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment

Abstract

Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people’s minds. This seems incompatible with ‘privileged access’ – the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that Carruthers’s new theory cannot clearly preserve the superior reliability of our beliefs about our own attitudes.     

A Paradigm to Assess Implicit Attitudes towards God: The Positive/Negative God Associations Task

Psychological research on the relationship between spirituality/religion and mental health has grown considerably over the past several decades and now constitutes a sizable body of scholarship. Among dimensions of S/R, positive beliefs about God have been significantly related to better mental health outcomes, and conversely negative beliefs about God are generally associated with more distress. However, prior research on this topic has relied heavily upon self-report Likert-type scales, which are vulnerable to self-report biases and measure only explicit cognitive processes. In this study, we developed and validated an implicit social cognition task, the Positive/Negative God Go/No-go Association Task (PNG-GNAT), for use in psychological research on spirituality and religion (S/R). Preliminary evidence in a large sample (N = 381) suggests that the PNG-GNAT demonstrates internal consistency, test–retest and split-half reliability, and concurrent evidence of validity. Further, our results suggest that PNG-GNAT scores represent different underlying dimensions of S/R than explicit self-report measures, and incrementally predict mental health above and beyond self-report assessment. The PNG-GNAT appears to be an effective tool for measuring implicit positive/negative beliefs about God.

     

Spirituality and Sexuality: An Exploration of the Religious Beliefs of Non-Heterosexual Christians in Great Britain

Abstract

This article analyzes the religious beliefs of 565 gay, lesbian and bisexual Christians, focusing on God, Jesus Christ and the Bible. Most respondents saw no conflict between their sexualities and their Christian faith. The examination of these religious beliefs uncovers themes that appear to be influenced by their social circumstances, the core of which being their stigmatized sexualities. Their beliefs of God were consistent with the ‘love and justice’ theme of queer theology. Jesus Christ was perceived as a good role model committed to social justice. Although the divinity of Christ was acknowledged, they did not consider him the exclusive way to salvation. The Bible was considered still relevant to everyday life. It was, however, not regarded as the sole guide for Christian living, and it should be interpreted through the lens of shifting socio-cultural realities and personal experiences. On the whole, the data seem to suggest that the respondents' personal experiences and collective social circumstances have an impact on their religious beliefs.     

Toynbee's Frantic Quest for Survival

ABSTRACT

Data from life review interviews with elder Catholic women religious show that through prayer they are able to experience solitude and to feel connected with others. Their experience is not completely explained by either the disengagement theory nor by the newer theory of gerotranscendence. Because prayer connects them to others, they do not experience complete social withdrawal; rather, prayer functions as a modified social activity connecting them to their past, to God, to the community in which they live, as well as to the wider world. They also do not develop a new transcendent meta-perspective, but deepen into cherished life beliefs and practices, accepting and becoming more fully who they are as individuals and as older women.     

Masculine God Imagery and Sense of Life Purpose: Examining Contingencies with America's “Four Gods”

Though God imagery has been extensively studied within sociological and psychological traditions, much less attention has been paid to gendered God concepts and their connections to well-being. Previous work has suggested that God images may reflect ontological assumptions that inform interpretations of the world as well as one's place within it. We argue that the relationship between masculine God imagery and a sense of life purpose may vary by gender and depend on further contingencies of other God images held by individuals’ images of God as engaged, angry, critical, and distant. Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey (n = 415 men and n = 577 women), our results suggest that stronger masculine God imagery was associated with greater life purpose for men, and lower life purpose for women. We also observed that stronger beliefs in an engaged God appeared to weaken the association between masculine God imagery and lower life purpose for women, while men who did not support masculine gender ideology reported lower life purpose if they endorsed stronger beliefs in an angry or critical God. We interpret our results by drawing on research at the intersection of gender, religion, and theology, and suggest several directions for future work.     

God is great – but not necessary? On Ara Norenzayan,Big Gods (2013)

Norenzayan provides ample evidence to support the claim that beliefs about moralizing Big Gods correlate with prosocial behavior. Atheists, for their part, are the most mistrusted minority wherever there is a widespread belief in moralizing gods. Projecting these patterns of thought and behavior on to our ancestors 10 000 years back is risky, though. It is a plausible hypothesis that prosociality in societies where people meet anonymous others on a regular basis may have coevolved with beliefs about Big Gods, but it remains historically speculative and the direction of causality is impossible to establish.     

Attachment to parents and to God: a panel-data approach

ABSTRACT

Research at the nexus of attachment theory and religion has generally been constrained both by data limitations and by a view of attachment style as fixed early in life. I use three waves of data to test key hypotheses from this literature in new ways. Closeness to mother and closeness to father serve as proxies for attachment to parents and closeness to God serves as a proxy for attachment to God. The correspondence hypothesis predicts that people who feel closer to their parents feel closer to God, the compensation hypothesis predicts that people lacking a parent feel closer to God, and the socialized correspondence hypothesis predicts that people with nonreligious parents will feel less close to God if they feel closer to their parents. I find strong evidence in favor of the correspondence hypothesis, but I find no evidence in favor of the compensation hypothesis or the socialized correspondence hypothesis.     

Religious meaning making and attachment in a disaster context: A longitudinal qualitative study of flood survivors

ABSTRACT

The goal of this longitudinal qualitative study was to develop a grounded theory of religious meaning making and attachment in a disaster context. At 1-month (T1; n = 36) and 6-months postdisaster (T2; n = 29), we conducted in-depth interviews with a highly religious sample of adult survivors of the 2016 Louisiana flood, using a disaster-adapted version of the Religious Attachment Interview. We utilized Corbin and Strauss’s grounded-theory approach for data analysis. At both timepoints, results revealed that survivors who were theistic believers engaged in postdisaster religious meaning making in which they drew on benevolent God representations and theodicies to appraise the disaster’s cause, purpose, and religious-attachment effects, thereby contributing to positive religious-attachment outcomes (religious meanings made; e.g. renewed beliefs and experiences of God’s benevolence and providence). Findings are discussed in terms of theories and research on disasters, meaning making, and religious attachment, including implications for research and practice.     

Exploring Culture-Specific Differences in Beliefs about Causes, Kinship and the Heritability of Major Depressive Disorder: The Views of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese-Australians

The aim of this study was to explore cultural differences in causal attributions and beliefs about heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD). Face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Celtic- and Chinese-Australians community members with a family history of MDD were conducted and subjected to a rigorous qualitative analysis, using the computer software NVivo. Sixteen Anglo-Celtic-Australians and 16 Chinese-Australians were interviewed. Both groups believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors contributed to MDD, that stress was an important cause of MDD, and that coping factors were significant moderators of the impact of stress on MDD. Both cultural groups believed that the causes of MDD affecting multiple family members included a shared family environment and a “contagion effect”, in addition to genetics. Unique to the Chinese-Australian group was the beliefs that parental pressures to exceed academically contributed to MDD; this cultural group also reported beliefs that depression was due to God’s will or alternatively fate, which in turn was related to attributions to feng shui and auspicious dates. This study documented key culture-specific differences in beliefs about causes and inheritance of MDD; such differences have major implications for clinician-patient communication about genetic risk associated with having a family history of MDD.     

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.     

Parasites of the mind. Why cultural theorists need the meme’s eye view

Are there any such things as mind parasites? By analogy with biological parasites, such cultural items are supposed to subvert or harm the interests of their host. The hypothesis of cultural parasitism has appeared in different guises in the burgeoning field of cultural evolution. To unpack the notion of mind parasites, we first clear some conceptual ground around the concept of cultural adaptation and its relation to human agency. We then formulate Millikan’s challenge: how can cultural items develop novel purposes of their own, cross-cutting or subverting our own personal purposes? If this central challenge is not met, talk of cultural ‘parasites’ or ‘selfish memes’ remains vacuous. First, we discuss why other attempts to answer Millikan’s challenge have failed. In particular, we put to rest the claims of panmemetics, a somewhat sinister worldview according to which human culture is nothing more than a swarm of selfish agents, plotting and scheming behind the scenes. Next, we reject a more reasonable, but still overly permissive approach to mind parasites, which equates them with biologically maladaptive culture. Finally, we present our own answer to Millikan’s challenge: certain systems of misbelief can be fruitfully treated as cultural parasites, designed by cultural evolution to subvert the interests of their human hosts. As a proof of concept, we discuss witchcraft beliefs in early modern Europe, and show how the meme’s eye view promises to shed new light on a mystery that historians and social scientists have been wrestling with for decades.     

Racism in the Hands of an Angry God: How Image of God Impacts Cultural Racism in Relation to Police Treatment of African Americans

Previous research suggests an angry God image is a narrative schema predicting support for more punitive forms of criminal justice. However, this research has not explored the possibility that racialization may impact one's God image. We perform logistic regression on Wave V of the Baylor Religion Survey to examine the correlation between an angry God image and the belief that police shoot Blacks more often because Blacks are more violent than Whites (a context-specific form of cultural racism). Engaging critical insights from intersectionality theory, we also interact angry God image with both racialized identity and racialized religious tradition. Results suggest that the angry God schema is associated with this form of cultural racism for White people generally as well as White Evangelicals, yet for Black Protestants, belief in an angry God is associated with resistance against this type of cultural racism.     

A Religious Interpretation of Emergence: Creativity as God

Thinking of God today as creativity (instead of as The Creator) enables us to bring theological values and meanings into significant connection with modern cosmological and evolutionary thinking. This conception connects our understanding of God with today's ideas of the Big Bang; cosmic and biological evolution; the evolutionary emergence of novel complex realities from simpler realities, and the irreducibility of these complex realities to their simpler origins; and so on. It eliminates anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism from the conception of God, thus overcoming one of the major reasons for the implausibility of God-talk in today's world—here viewed as a highly dynamic reality (not an essentially stable structure), with God regarded as the ongoing creativity in this world. This mystery of creativity—God—manifest throughout the universe is quite awe-inspiring, calling forth emotions of gratitude, love, peace, fear, and hope, and a sense of the profound meaningfulness of human existence in the world—issues with which faith in God usually has been associated. It is appropriate, therefore, to think of God today as precisely this magnificent panorama of creativity with which our universe and our lives confront us.     

Minds and Bodies: Human and Divine

Does God have a mind? Western theism has traditionally construed God as an intentional agent who acts on creation and in relation to humankind. God loves, punishes, and redeems. God's intentionality has traditionally been construed in analogy to human intentionality, which in turn has often presumed a supernatural dualism. Developments in cognitive science, however, render supernatural dualism suspect for explaining the human mind. How, then, can we speak of the mind of God? Borrowing from Daniel Dennett's intentional stance, I suggest that analogical reasoning regarding the mind of God be abandoned in favor of an ontologically agnostic approach that treats God as an intentional system. In this approach, God's purposive action is an explanatory feature of the believer's universe, a real pattern that informs our values and beliefs about the world and our place in it.     

Explaining and Explaining Away in Science and Religion

Abstract

There is no good reason to think that there is a necessary conflict between science and the existence of God, but is there still some way in which science might support atheism? The most plausible strategy for atheism is to argue that scientific explanations can remove the need for God in some cases via “explaining away.” This paper proposes a number of questions to help identify whether explaining away takes place in a given context, and explores several cases where explaining away might be thought to occur, with particular attention given to the most obvious case: the theory of evolution.     

Dimensions of belief about miraculous healing

Although social scientists have convincingly demonstrated relationships between religious beliefs/practices and mental health, almost none of the empirical findings or related theory apply specifically to Jews. To address this limitation, we investigated the role of Jewish religiousness in anxiety, depression, and happiness, in a large Jewish community sample (n = 565). Several facets of global Jewish religiousness were examined, as well as a theoretically based Jewish religious variable, trust in God. A self-report measure of trust in God was created, and factor analyses yielded two reliable and valid subscales: trust in God and mistrust in God. Contrary to our hypotheses, global Jewish religiousness was on the whole unrelated to mental-health functioning. As expected, higher levels of trust in God were associated with less anxiety and depression, and greater personal happiness, whereas inverse associations emerged for the unanticipated but robust mistrust subscale.     

The social context as a determinant of teacher motivational strategies in physical education

ObjectivesThe purpose of the study was to provide an in-depth analysis of how the Physical Education (PE) teaching context influences teachers' motivational strategies towards students.DesignQualitative semi-structured interviewsMethodsUsing Self-determination theory (Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). Psychological Enquiry, 11, 227-268) as a guiding framework, semi-structured interviews of 22 PE teachers were examined using categorical content analysis.ResultsThe teachers perceived that an emphasis on student assessment and the time constraints associated with PE lessons often compelled them to use teaching strategies which conflicted with their beliefs about the most appropriate ways to motivate students. The teachers' own performance evaluations and pressure to conform to other teachers' methods also influenced the teachers' motivational strategies, but these influences were often congruent with their teaching beliefs. Additionally, the teachers discussed how perceived cultural norms associated with the teacher-student relationship impacted upon their chosen motivational strategies. These cultural norms were reported by different teachers as either in line, or in conflict with their teaching beliefs. Finally, the influence of the teachers' perceptions of their students helped produce strategies that were congruent with their beliefs, but often different to empirically suggested strategies.ConclusionsIt is important that teacher beliefs are targeted in education programs and that the teaching context aid in facilitating adaptive motivational strategies.     

The study of the Persian mystical fable’s capacity to be rewritten as spiritual literature for children in the light of the theory of relational consciousness

ABSTRACT

‘Relational consciousness’ introduces four kinds of relationships as characteristics of children’s spirituality: relation with self, others, environment and the higher being or God. These four relationships have also been noted in Persian mystical fables. The aim of the present study is to review some of these fables so as to assess their capacity for being rewritten as spiritual literature for children in the light of this theory. We contend that fables which pay more attention to the relationship with self and God, have less capacity because of their abstract concepts. Fables concerning the relationship with the environment and others are more suitable for being rewritten for the child reader, as they are more objective and perceptible. Many fables of this kind have the potential to guide the reader from the relationship with the environment and others to the relationship with self and God. The study also shows that Persian mystical fables could be used as a rich source for nourishing the child’s spirituality according to the theory of relational consciousness.