Believing in other minds: Accurate mentalizing does not predict religiosity Jennifer Vonk ⁎, Jerrica Pitzen Oakland University, United States abstract article info Article history: Received 21 December 2015 Received in revised form 31 May 2016 Accepted 4 June 2016 Available online 13 June 2016 Theorists have argued that religious beliefs emerged as a consequence of the human propensity to attribute men- tal states. However, little empirical work has explored the relationship between individual variability in theory of mind (ToM) and religious beliefs. We investigated the connection between empathy, emotional intelligence, sys- temizing, ToM, and religiosity in two college student samples. Empathy was correlated with aspects of religiosity but did not uniquely predict religiosity. Emotional intelligence was positively related to religiosity, whereas ToM was either unrelated or negatively related to religiosity. We argue that the basic ability to reason about self and other, including self-awareness (emotional intelligence) and empathy, rather than accuracy in mentalizing (ToM), predicts religiosity. However, despite these intriguing patterns, our measures of sociocognitive abilities explained little variance in our religiosity measures. Future research should explore other samples including those absent of empathy and ToM, and should explore capacities such as agency detection. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Keywords: Religiosity Empathy Emotional intelligence Theory of mind Mentalizing 1. Introduction Many Americans continue to embrace religion, making it important to understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms associated with adherence to such belief systems. Because theory of mind (ToM) consti- tutes the ability to reason about the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, attributions to supernatural beings may come about as an over- extension of ToM (Bering, 2011; Bering & Shackelford, 2004; Gervais, 2013; Shaffer, 2008). In this view, ToM may be a necessary but not suf- ficient pre-cursor to religious beliefs. However, ToM may be decomposed into varying levels of complexity. For example, Flavell (2004); Dennett (1987), and Selman (1977) differentiated between first order ToM – the ability to reason about others' mental states, and second order ToM – the ability to reason about someone's thoughts about another's thoughts – functionally metarepresentation. Further- more, the ability to read outward indicators of mental states, such as emotion expressions, represents only a cursory level of ToM compared to the ability to reason about intentions and knowledge states (Apperly, 2012). More advanced ToM capabilities may be seen as representing conceptually distinct processes, or as recruiting other re- lated cognitive process, such as executive function. Individuals may also vary in their motivations to employ ToM in their day to day interac- tions with others (Apperly, 2012). Motivation to employ ToM may re- flect differences in empathy, which to some extent depends upon the basic ToM capacity but allows individuals to differ in their use of ToM. Thus, we attempted to examine the connection between religiosity and ToM, taking the various levels of complexity of ToM, along with em- pathy, into account. Despite significant recent theorizing about the connection between ToM and religious beliefs (Atran, 2006; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2002, 2003; Bering & Shackelford, 2004; Boyd, 2008; Boyer, 2001; Gervais, 2013; Guthrie, 2001), the study of religious beliefs and their connection to cognitive traits is still in its infancy. Sev- eral studies have explored the relationship between empathy and religi- osity, but none have focused on the relationship between ToM at varying levels of complexity and religiosity. Prior studies have assessed a single construct (e.g. perspective-taking or empathy) without captur- ing higher order ToM capacities or using multiple assessments of the same construct (Lindeman, Svedholm-Häkkinen, & Lipsanen, 2015; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013). Prior theorizing would lead one to hypothesize that those with higher individual ToM scores might display greater religiosity. However, it is possible that accuracy in mind-reading reflects the use of other more sophisticated cognitive processes, which allow one to distinguish between real and imagined agents, which are a byproduct of one's own beliefs. Empathy measures are sometimes conflated with measures of mentalizing (e.g. Willard & Norenzayan, 2013) but they typically assess only an individual's self-report of the tendency to engage in thinking about another's feelings and, unlike ToM measures, do not assess accu- racy in reading other kinds of mental states. Emotional awareness – a related construct – is defined as the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotional states and to use them effectively to guide behavior, but is also assessed by self-report rather than tests of accuracy. Thus, empathy and emotional intelligence are better representatives of the Personality and Individual Differences 115 (2017) 70–76 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, Oakland University, 2200 N Squirrel Rd, Rochester, MI 48309, United States. E-mail address: vonk@oakland.edu (J. Vonk). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.06.008 0191-8869/Published by Elsevier Ltd. 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