Religious and spiritual belief have been positively associated with social and emotional cognition [8–22] and negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking [1, 4–8]. The present studies make two key contributions to the current literature. First, we distinguish between different dimensions of social cognition, and second we assess their association with belief while also controlling for their negative association with analytic thinking. According to our theoretical model, moral concern represents one broad dimension of social cognition distinct from mentalizing [24, 29, 30, 46]. This view is supported by the observation that moral concern and mentalizing relate to distinct neuropsychological profiles, such that a deficit in moral concern is the primary personality characteristic of psychopathy [33, 37, 38], whereas a deficit in mentalizing is thought to be a key characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders [32, 33, 35]. To our knowledge, this is the first series of studies to simultaneously test these three cognitive constructs—analytic thinking, moral concern, and mentalizing—in order to test the extent to which each independently contributes to religious and spiritual belief.
The studies presented here establish a clear positive association between moral concern, using a variety of specific measures which represent components of this broader construct, and belief in God and/or a universal spirit. This relationship was found to be robust even when controlling for the previously established link between analytic thinking and religious disbelief. Further, no evidence was found supporting the view that either direct or indirect measures of mentalizing predict belief after taking into account measures of moral concern.
We report eight studies (total n = 2212), including seven online studies and one laboratory based study. In every study we found that a central aspect of moral concern, empathic concern (IRI-EC), significantly predicted religious and spiritual belief. This relationship was found both for bivariate correlations and after entering all other variables into a regression analysis. In three of the studies (3, 4 & 5), we found that belief was additionally positively predicted by a second measure of moral concern (IWAH_Global, prosocial intentions, peer-reported empathy). In our final study, we demonstrated that the link between empathic concern and belief remained after controlling for socially desirable responding, religious attendance/practice and social affiliation with religion.
Of the seven studies which included measures of analytic thinking, all demonstrated a negative relationship with belief in the bivariate correlations; however, this relationship only remained significant in 2 out of the 7 studies after entering other variables into the regression analyses. We conducted a pooled analysis to establish whether or not a measure of analytic thinking (CRT) remained significant after accounting for its negative relationship with empathic concern (IRI-EC). We found that CRT performance did account for variance in belief; however, the effect was significantly smaller than the positive relationship observed with the IRI-EC.
