{"id":293,"date":"2010-04-04T20:43:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-04T19:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/04\/you-either-believe-in-it-all-or-you-dont.html"},"modified":"2014-11-12T05:13:02","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T04:13:02","slug":"you-either-believe-in-it-all-or-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/04\/you-either-believe-in-it-all-or-you.html","title":{"rendered":"You either believe in it all, or you don\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Many people believe in fate. When bad or good things happen, they tend to think they happened for a reason \u2013 even for events that are entirely random (winning the lottery, for instance). Often, people think that these things happen because some guiding hand or supernatural force caused them.<\/p>\n

So the question is, why are these delusions so common? Do we humans have an inbuilt predisposition (a cognitive bias) that leads us to anthropomorphize events? That\u2019s one explanation that\u2019s been suggested. The idea is that the brain machinery devoted to figuring out what\u2019s going on inside another person\u2019s head (the so-called \u2018theory of mind\u2019) also acts to interpret major life events as purposeful and meaningful.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Alternatively, fatalism might simply be one other aspect of basic errors in thinking that lead to all sorts of mistakes about how the world operates. Perhaps fatalism is just a kind of paranormal delusion, and they are all caused by an inability to understand how the world works.<\/p>\n

New research from Annika Svedholm and colleagues from the University of Helsinki suggest that\u2019s exactly what happens.<\/p>\n

They surveyed over two thousand Finns (mostly women, but with a good age range \u2013 not just students) on whether they believed that seemingly random events were in fact caused by an invisible agency. Then they asked about their paranormal beliefs.<\/p>\n

They also asked a series of questions to test their subjects\u2019 basic understanding of how the world works (their \u2018core knowledge confusion\u201d). Here\u2019s some examples \u2013 many people would recognise them as poetic metaphors, but those with core knowledge confusion tend to think that they are literally true:<\/p>\n