ABSTRACT

The motivational account of religious belief – that belief fulfills some psychological need – has been historically popular, and recent studies have identified a causal role for anxiety in particular. However, the cognitive mechanisms by which anxiety ultimately produces religious belief are unclear. In two studies, we show that anxiety intensifies a known cognitive bias to recall supernatural agents via preferential processing of the threatening characteristics of these agents. Across the two studies, participants exposed to an anxiety manipulation at encoding (but not at retrieval) exhibited a stronger recall bias for supernatural agents than controls, regardless of how anxiety was elicited and regardless of participants’ religiosity. The results suggest that people in anxious states are more likely to remember and accumulate representations of supernatural or “godlike” agents than people in non-anxious states, potentially biasing them toward religious belief in these agents. This work therefore lends support and detail to the motivational account, addresses the puzzle of why some malevolent gods attract believers, and, by illustrating the importance of anxiety in recall for supernatural agents, argues for the construction of cognitive-motivational models of religious belief.

摘要

宗教信仰的动机说明——这种信仰满足了某种心理需求——在历史上一直很流行，最近的研究特别确定了焦虑的因果关系。然而，焦虑最终产生宗教信仰的认知机制尚不清楚。在两项研究中，我们表明，焦虑通过优先处理这些特工的威胁特征，加剧了已知的认知偏见，以回忆超自然特工。在这两项研究中，无论焦虑是如何引发的，也不管参与者的宗教信仰如何，在编码时（但不是在检索时）暴露于焦虑操纵的参与者对超自然因素的回忆偏见比对照组更强。结果表明，处于焦虑状态的人比处于非焦虑状态的人更有可能记住和积累超自然或“神一样”的代理人的表征，这可能使他们偏向于对这些代理人的宗教信仰。因此，这项工作为动机说明提供了支持和细节，解决了为什么一些恶毒的神会吸引信徒的谜团，并通过说明焦虑在回忆超自然因素中的重要性，主张构建宗教信仰的认知动机模型。