The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents

PLoS One. 2019 Aug 8;14(8):e0220886. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220886. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a "religious" or a "fictional" agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous-violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge-and fewer abilities that violated folk physics and biology. Similarly, participants rated folk psychology violations provided by the experimenter as more characteristic of religious agents than were violations of folk physics or folk biology, while fictional agents showed no clear pattern. Religious agents were also judged as more potentially beneficial, and more ambivalent (i.e., similar ratings of benefit and harm), than fictional agents, regardless of whether the agents were invented or well-known to participants. Together, the results support a motivational account of religious belief formation that is facilitated by these biases.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Bias
  • Concept Formation
  • Humans
  • Motivation
  • Religion
  • Religion and Psychology*

Grants and funding

This research was supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (JH: 52257 and 60624; https://templeton.org) and The New Zealand Royal Society’s Marsden Fund (JH: UOO1312; https://royalsociety.org.nz). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.