Religious Cognition and Behaviour in Autism: The Role of Mentalizing

Mentalizing, or theory of mind, has been argued to be critical for supporting religious beliefs and practices involving supernatural agents. As individuals with autism spectrum conditions have been found to have deficits in mentalizing, this raises the question as to how they may conceive of gods and behave in relation to gods. To examine this, we compared high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum conditions (HFA) to typically developing individuals across seven key aspects of religious cognition and behaviour: (a) strength of belief, (b) anthropomorphism of god concepts, (c) felt closeness toward the god, (d) prayer habits, (e) attraction to prayer, (f) efficacy of prayer, and (g) a sense of agency while praying. A battery of mentalizing tasks was administered to measure mentalizing ability, along with the Autism-Spectrum Quotient. As expected, typically developing subjects performed better than HFA subjects in the advanced mentalizing task. However, no statistically significant differences were found with first-order and second-order false belief tasks. In contrast to our predictions and previous research on the religiosity of HFA, we found very little differences between the groups in their religious cognition and behaviour. Moreover, the relationship between mentalizing ability and most of our measures of religious cognition and behaviour was weak and negative. Our data suggest that HFA's deficits in mentalizing appear to have only minimal impact on the way they interact and think about gods. We end the article by reevaluating the role mentalizing may have in religious cognition and behaviour.