Study links belief in God linked to empathy

People who have difficulty imagining what others are thinking are less likely to believe in God, according to a new study co-authored by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of California.

The ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of other people is called "mentalizing" and it appears to play an important role in religious belief, according to researcher Ara Norenzayan.

"When people are thinking about God or praying to God, they are trying to understand God's mind, his wishes and beliefs," wrote Norenzayan in an email interview.

"When adults form inferences about God's mind, they show the same mentalizing biases that are typically found when reasoning about other peoples' minds," the study authors wrote. Religious believers have an idea of God as an intentional being who responds to human beliefs and desires.

The researchers found that people who rate highest on the autistic spectrum — those with an inability to respond accurately to the mental states of other people — are least likely to believe in God.

Men typically are not as good as women at reasoning about other people's states of mind and are more likely than women to score high on the autism spectrum, which may help explain why men are less likely to believe in God than women.

The study illuminates a previously overlooked psychological explanation for the over-representation of men among disbelievers, according to the authors.

If someone is less able to imagine what God is thinking, then belief in God is less intuitive and a personal deity is less believable, Norenzayan explained.

"(Mentalizing) is not the only factor, just one of a combination of factors that explain who is likely to be a believer and who isn't," Norenzayan wrote. A previous study by Norenzayan and his co-author, UBC's Will Gervais, found that a tendency toward analytical thinking is also more common among disbelievers.

Norenzayan, Gervais and Kali Trzesniewski at University of California Davis used self-reporting techniques to measure subjects' level of religious belief and their ability to mentalize — what they call the empathy quotient.

"The empathy quotient measures the degree to which an individual thinks about and is concerned with the mental states of other people, their beliefs, wishes and emotions," Norenzayan wrote.

The authors based their findings on four separate but related studies. Among the findings:

- A low empathy quotient — a reduced ability to mentalize — predicted a reduced belief in God.

- Autistic teens were only 11 per cent as likely as non-autistic teens to believe in God.

- Adult men were less than half as likely as adult women to believe in a personal God.