Research Article
Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non‐believers
Summary
Illusory face perception, a tendency to find human‐like faces where none are actually present in, for example, artifacts or scenery, is a common phenomenon that occasionally enters the public eye. We used two tests (N = 47) to analyze the relationship between paranormal and religious beliefs and illusory face perception. In a detection task, the participants detected face‐like features from pictures of scenery and landscapes with and without face‐like areas and, in a rating task, evaluated the face‐likeness and emotionality of these areas. Believer groups were better at identifying the previously defined face‐like regions in the images but were also prone to false alarms. Signal detection analysis revealed that believers had more liberal answering criteria than skeptics, but the actual detection sensitivity did not differ. The paranormal believers also evaluated the artifact faces as more face‐like and emotional than the skeptics, and a similar trend was found between religious and non‐religious people. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Citing Literature
Number of times cited: 26
- Stefanie B. Northover and Adam B. Cohen, Understanding Religion from Cultural and Biological Perspectives, The Handbook of Culture and Biology, (55-77), (2017).
- Stewart Guthrie, Prediction and feedback may constrain but do not stop anthropomorphism, Religion, Brain & Behavior, (1), (2017).
- Marc Andersen, Predictive coding in agency detection, Religion, Brain & Behavior, (1), (2017).
- Luke Galen, Overlapping Mental Magisteria: Implications of Experimental Psychology for a Theory of Religious Belief as Misattribution, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 10.1163/15700682-12341393, (2017).
- Yuki Miyazaki, Being Watched by Anthropomorphized Objects Affects Charitable Donation in Religious People , Japanese Psychological Research, 59, 3, (221-229), (2017).
- Michiel van Elk, The self-attribution bias and paranormal beliefs, Consciousness and Cognition, 10.1016/j.concog.2017.02.001, 49, (313-321), (2017).
- Rafael Wlodarski and Eiluned Pearce, The God Allusion, Human Nature, 10.1007/s12110-016-9256-9, 27, 2, (160-172), (2016).
- Stephen J. Gray and David A. Gallo, Paranormal psychic believers and skeptics: a large-scale test of the cognitive differences hypothesis, Memory & Cognition, 10.3758/s13421-015-0563-x, 44, 2, (242-261), (2015).
- Liz Goodnick, A De Jure Criticism of Theism, Open Theology, 10.1515/opth-2016-0003, 2, 1, (2016).
- Mercedes Sheen and Timothy R. Jordan, Believing is Seeing: A Perspective on Perceiving Images of Objects on the Shroud of Turin, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 10.1163/15736121-12341320, 38, 2, (232-251), (2016).
- Michiel van Elk, Bastiaan T. Rutjens, Joop van der Pligt and Frenk van Harreveld, Priming of supernatural agent concepts and agency detection, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 10.1080/2153599X.2014.933444, 6, 1, (4-33), (2014).
- Michael A. Nees and Charlotte Phillips, Auditory Pareidolia: Effects of Contextual Priming on Perceptions of Purportedly Paranormal and Ambiguous Auditory Stimuli, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29, 1, (129-134), (2014).
- Elisa Järnefelt, Caitlin F. Canfield and Deborah Kelemen, The divided mind of a disbeliever: Intuitive beliefs about nature as purposefully created among different groups of non-religious adults, Cognition, 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.02.005, 140, (72-88), (2015).
- A Glendon and Sharon Clarke, References, Human Safety and Risk Management, 10.1201/b19401-13, (365-454), (2015).
- Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom, Why did this happen to me? Religious believers’ and non-believers’ teleological reasoning about life events, Cognition, 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.017, 133, 1, (277-303), (2014).
- Tapani Riekki, Marjaana Lindeman and Tuukka T. Raij, Supernatural believers attribute more intentions to random movement than skeptics: An fMRI study, Social Neuroscience, 10.1080/17470919.2014.906366, 9, 4, (400-411), (2014).
- Michiel van Elk, Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection than skeptics, Consciousness and Cognition, 10.1016/j.concog.2013.07.004, 22, 3, (1041-1046), (2013).
- Timothy R. Jordan, Mercedes Sheen, Lily Abedipour, Kevin B. Paterson and Michiel van Elk, Seeing Inscriptions on the Shroud of Turin: The Role of Psychological Influences in the Perception of Writing, PLOS ONE, 10.1371/journal.pone.0136860, 10, 10, (e0136860), (2015).
- Katharina Schmack, Hannes Rössler, Maria Sekutowicz, Eva J. Brandl, Daniel J. Müller, Predrag Petrovic and Philipp Sterzer, Linking unfounded beliefs to genetic dopamine availability, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00521, 9, (2015).
- Nicole D. Anderson, Teaching signal detection theory with pseudoscience, Frontiers in Psychology, 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00762, 6, (2015).
- Michiel van Elk and Philip Allen, Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs, PLOS ONE, 10.1371/journal.pone.0130422, 10, 6, (e0130422), (2015).
- Christine Mohr, Nikolaos Koutrakis and Gustav Kuhn, Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases, Frontiers in Psychology, 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01542, 5, (2015).
- Robert Brotherton, Christopher C. French and Jakob Pietschnig, Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality, PLOS ONE, 10.1371/journal.pone.0124125, 10, 5, (e0124125), (2015).
- Marc Andersen, Thies Pfeiffer, Sebastian Müller and Uffe Schjoedt, Agency detection in predictive minds: a virtual reality study, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 10.1080/2153599X.2017.1378709, (1-13), (2017).
- Ryan McKay, The role of experience in religion: accommodation vs. assimilation, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 10.1080/2153599X.2017.1323782, (1-4), (2017).
- Adam E. Tratner, Todd K. Shackelford, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Jennifer Vonk and Melissa M. McDonald, Fear the unseen: supernatural belief and agency detection in virtual reality, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 10.1080/2153599X.2018.1526207, (1-14), (2018).
