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{"id":91,"date":"2012-07-02T22:02:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T21:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2012\/07\/what-sort-of-religious-person-believes-in-meddling-spirits.html"},"modified":"2014-11-12T03:28:06","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T02:28:06","slug":"what-sort-of-religious-person-believes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2012\/07\/what-sort-of-religious-person-believes.html","title":{"rendered":"What sort of religious person believes in meddling spirits?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Now, for obvious reasons it\u2019s frequently assumed that HAD has something to do with why so many people believe in supernatural beings. And yet what\u2019s also clear is that we are not all endowed with equally sensitive predispositions to see magical beings at work.<\/p>\n

Raluca Petrican, at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, and Christopher Burris at St. Jerome\u2019s University (also in Canada) set out to measure the strength of the HAD in students and other young adults, and to see how it varied with the kind of faith they had.<\/p>\n

To test the strength of the HAD, they showed their subject faces gazing either to the left, to the right, or straight ahead. Letters appeared on the same computer screen \u2013 either in the location where the face was looking, on the opposite side. They had to press a left or right button according to where the letters appeared.<\/p>\n

Normally, if a face is looking at the place where the letter appears, you will tend to press the button more quickly. That\u2019s because we pick up on facial cues instinctively. <\/p>\n

What Petrican and Burris did was to show some of the faces upside down. Most people don\u2019t follow the gaze nearly so strongly in this circumstance. But some people do, and these people were also more likely to attribute human-like emotional states (emotions, intentions, free will) to things like cars and computers.<\/p>\n

People who tended to score highly on these measures of HAD also tended to agree with statements like \u201c\u201cLearning to appreciate one\u2019s dark or \u2018sinful\u2019 side is essential to spiritual growth\u201d; \u201cFor me, being religious means learning to accept life as it is\u201d<\/p>\n

These statements are measures of \u2018immanence\u2019, or the tendency to report experiences typified by a sense of connection or oneness between self, God, and\/or the physical world.<\/p>\n

Individuals who thought of God in more distinct terms \u2013 as an agent that acts in the world but is actually distinct from it \u2013 had less active agency detection.<\/p>\n

All of which suggests that the HAD is indeed linked to religion \u2013 but not to religion in general. Rather, people with HAD tend to adopt a particular kind of religion, and that folks without it can be equally religious.<\/p>\n

$\"ResearchBlogging.org\"$ <\/a><\/span>
Raluca Petrican, & Christopher T. Burris (2012). Am I the Stone? Overattribution of Agency and Religious Orientation Psychology of Religion and Spirituality<\/span> DOI: 10.1037\/a0027942<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

$\"Creative$ <\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"