Religious believers intuitively conceptualize deities as intentional agents with mental states who anticipate and respond to human beliefs, desires and concerns. It follows that mentalizing deficits, associated with the autistic spectrum and also commonly found in men more than in women, may undermine this intuitive support and reduce belief in a personal God. Autistic adolescents expressed less belief in God than did matched neuro-typical controls (Study 1). In a Canadian student sample (Study 2), and two American national samples that controlled for demographic characteristics and other correlates of autism and religiosity (Study 3 and 4), the autism spectrum predicted reduced belief in God, and mentalizing mediated this relationship. Systemizing (Studies 2 and 3) and two personality dimensions related to religious belief, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness (Study 3), failed as mediators. Mentalizing also explained the robust and well-known, but theoretically debated, gender gap in religious belief wherein men show reduced religious belief (Studies 2–4).

Funding: The authors acknowledge support by SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) grants to Norenzayan (410-2010-0297) and Trzesniewski (410-2009-1449), and an APA (American Psychological Association) Division 36 research seed grant to Gervais. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Copyright: © 2012 Norenzayan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

For Studies 2–4, approval was obtained from the Behavioral Research Ethics Board (BREB) at the University of British Columbia, and all participants provided written informed consent (for participants who completed the study via the internet, consent was provided by clicking a designated button online; this was approved by the UBC BREB). For Study 1, the parent was given a letter of information and signed a written consent form and the child was given an assent form to read and sign. Approval for the study was obtained from the University of Western Ontario Research Ethics Board.

We used an individual differences approach to test three interrelated cognitive hypotheses: 1) the autistic spectrum is inversely related to belief in God, 2) mentalizing mediates this relation, and 3) mentalizing mediates the long-known, but theoretically ambiguous, gender gap wherein men show reduced religious belief than women. Study 1 compared religious belief in a sample of adolescents with clinical diagnoses of autism with a neuro-typical sample matched on relevant socio-demographic characteristics. Studies 2–4 replicated and extended our findings to three distinct non-clinical samples that measured autism as a continuous variable rather than as a clinical diagnosis. These studies also enabled formal mediation analyses, in which we tested our hypotheses with multiple mediation bootstrapping based on 9999 resamples [27] , an analytic technique for simultaneously testing multiple potential mediators (thus avoiding the inferential pitfalls of sequential analyses). In all analyses where gender was included, it was coded (female = 0, male = 1), and all other variables were standardized. Studies 2–4 also controlled for additional socio-demographic and psychological variables related to autism, mentalizing, and religiosity that addressed several alternative explanations, which we evaluate in the General Discussion.

In neuroimaging studies, thinking about [14] and praying to [15] God activates brain regions implicated in mentalizing; thus mentalizing might be a necessary component of belief in God, without being a sufficient cause. When adults form inferences about God's mind, they show the same mentalizing biases that are typically found when reasoning about other peoples' minds [16] – [18] . Developmentally, children's reasoning about God's mental states, and about other non-physical agents, tracks the cognitive development of mentalizing tendencies [19] , [20] . Finally, mentalizing is deficient at higher levels of the autism spectrum [8] , [9] , [21] , [22] , and interestingly men are both more likely to score high on the autism spectrum [23] and more likely to be non-believers [24] – [26] . These lines of evidence suggest that mentally representing supernatural beings (and their mental states) requires mentalizing capacities. This in turn implies that mentalizing deficits would constrain intuitive support for belief in God. Recent unpublished findings by Caldwell-Harris, Murphy, Velazquez, and McNamara (2011) provide some indirect support to this line of reasoning. Adults who reported being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder were more likely than a neuro-typical comparison group to self-identify as atheist and less likely to belong to an organized religion.

Belief in God and other supernatural agents is culturally and historically widespread, and is a deeply affecting aspect of human life [1] . Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive foundations of these complex sociocultural beliefs. Believers intuitively treat gods as intentional agents with mental states who enter into social relationships with humans, using supernatural powers to assuage existential concerns, respond to human desires, and monitor their social behaviour [1] – [5] . Cognitive theories therefore converge on the hypothesis that supernatural agent beliefs are partly rooted in ordinary human social cognition. Specifically, the social-cognitive capacity to represent and reason about minds-termed mentalizing, theory of mind, or mind perception [6] , [7] -also enables the mental representation of God and other supernatural agents [2] , [7] . If mentalizing supports the mental representation of supernatural agents, then mentalizing deficits associated with the autistic spectrum and also commonly found in men more than in women [6] , [8] , [9] may undermine intuitive support for supernatural agent concepts and reduce belief in God [1] , [10] – [13] . Here we examine the hypothesis-long predicted, though currently untested- that mentalizing deficits constrain belief in God.

Results and Discussion

Study 1 In a logistic regression model with autism diagnosis and IQ predicting belief in God, autistic participants were only 11% as likely as neuro-typical controls to strongly endorse God, OR = .11, 95% CI = .01, .96, Wald = 3.98, p = .046, and IQ was unrelated to belief, OR = 1.01, 95% CI = .96, 1.06, Wald = .22, p = .64. This study allowed comparison of individuals with autism diagnoses with a matched control group, but the small sample size rendered statistical mediation testing unfeasible. As an alternative, we entered IQ and parental ratings of adolescent mentalizing tendencies (the two were uncorrelated r = .15, p = .50) as independent predictors of belief in God. In this logistic regression model, only mentalizing was a significant predictor: for each standard deviation decrease in mentalizing, participants were only 21% as likely to strongly endorse God, OR = .21, 95% CI = .06, .73, Wald = 6.07, p = .01, and again IQ was not a significant predictor, OR = 1.03, 95% CI = .98, 1.08, Wald = .96, p = .33.

Study 2 Study 2 utilized a Canadian student sample and measured belief in God, a standard self-report measure of the autism spectrum, and both mentalizing (The Empathy Quotient) and systemizing [28] as potential mediators. Empathy has been used extensively to detect individual differences in adult mentalizing tendencies, including perspective taking, interest in others' beliefs and desires, and understanding emotions. It is inversely correlated with autism and with being male [8], [28]. Systemizing assesses individual differences in abilities and interests concerning physical and rule-based systems. Because systemizing is positively correlated with autism and with being male [28], but is typically orthogonal to mentalizing, it was included as a second potential mediator. Neither mentalizing nor systemizing has religious content or share conceptual resemblance with the belief in God measure. We tested our two primary hypotheses with autism and gender (respectively) predicting belief in God, and mentalizing (Empathy) and systemizing as potential mediators. First, we tested our autism-related hypothesis (Fig. 1A). As hypothesized, higher autism scores predicted lower belief in God, β = −.13, p = .02 (controlling for gender). Critically, as predicted, mentalizing significantly mediated this relationship, b MentalizingIndirect = −.07, 95% CI = −.14, −.01. Systemizing was not a significant mediator, b SystemizingIndirect = .00, 95% CI = −.007, .009. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. Study 2: Mentalizing, but not systemizing, mediated the effects of both autism spectrum (A) and gender (B) on belief in God (N = 327). †p<.10, *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001. Note. OR = odds ratio; β = standardized beta; b = unstandardized beta. Values in parentheses are mediated effects. Autism Analysis Covariate: Gender. Gender Analysis Covariate: Autism Spectrum. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036880.g001 We next examined the effect of gender (Fig. 1B). Consistent with past research, there was a trend for men to report weaker belief in God than women (controlling for the autism spectrum), b = −.21, p = .08 (this gender gap was significant at p = .05 when autism was not controlled). As hypothesized, there was a significant indirect effect, such that men were lower in mentalizing, and in turn lower mentalizing predicted lower belief in God, b MentalizingIndirect = .04, 95% CI = .003, .103; there was no significant indirect effect for systemizing, b SystemizingIndirect = −.001, 95% CI = −.086, .084, even though gender more strongly predicted systemizing (b = .71) than mentalizing (b = −.21).

Study 3 Study 3 replicated and extended findings from Study 2 to a broad national sample of American adults, controlled for a range of covariates of the autism spectrum and religious belief, and used an alternative measure of belief in and a personal relationship with God. We again tested mentalizing (The Empathy Quotient) and systemizing as mediators. In addition, we measured and tested two additional potential mediators. Two of the five basic facets of personality [29], Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, are reliably related to religious belief and involvement in both previous research [30], [31] and also in the current sample. Therefore it is plausible that they could also explain links between autism or gender and belief in God. In a logistic regression model with autism spectrum predicting belief in a personal God, controlling for gender, age, educational attainment, income, and frequency of religious attendance, for each standard deviation increase in autism scores, participants were only 80% as likely to strongly endorse a personal God, OR = .80, 95% CI = .66, .97, Wald = 5.25, p = .02. Mentalizing emerged again as a significant mediator of this relationship, b MentalizingIndirect = −.20, 95% CI = −.37, −.04, while systemizing did not, b SystemizingIndirect = −.007, 95% CI = −.03, .008 (Fig. 2A). Furthermore, neither of the two personality measures were significant mediators, b ConscientiousnessIndirect = −.02, 95% CI = −.07, .02, b AgreeablenessIndirect = −.10, 95% CI = −.20, .004. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 2. Study 3: Mentalizing, but not systemizing, mediated the effects of both autism spectrum (A) and gender (B) on belief in a personal God (N = 706). *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001. Note. OR = odds ratio; β = standardized beta; b = unstandardized beta. Agreeableness, or Conscientiousness (not shown) also failed as mediators. Values in parentheses are mediated effects. Autism Analysis Covariates: Gender, Age, Education, Income, Religious attendance. Gender Analysis Covariates: Autism Spectrum, Age, Education, Income, Religious attendance. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036880.g002 In a separate logistic regression model, men were only 60% as likely to report strong belief in a personal God as women, controlling for the autism spectrum, age, income, educational attainment, and frequency of religious attendance, OR = .60, 95% CI = .41, .89, Wald = 6.55, p = .01. Replicating the pattern from Study 2, there was a significant indirect effect such that men were lower in mentalizing, and in turn lower mentalizing scores predicted lower belief in a personal God, b MentalizingIndirect = −.15, 95% CI = −.28, −.06 (Fig. 2B); there was no significant indirect effect for any other potential mediator, b SystemizingIndirect = −.007, 95% CI = −.03, .008, b ConscientiousnessIndirect = −.02, 95% CI = −.07, .02, b AgreeablenessIndirect = −.10, 95% CI = −.20, .004. It was noteworthy that systemizing again failed as a mediator of the gender effect, despite the fact that, once again, gender more strongly predicted systemizing (b = .62) than mentalizing (b = −.33) (Fig. 2B). Finally, in a comprehensive logistic regression model predicting high belief in a personal God, including all predictors (autism and gender), covariates (age, education, income, religious attendance), and potential mediating variables (mentalizing, systemizing, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness), mentalizing emerged as a specific, independent, and robust predictor of belief in a personal God, OR = 1.41, Wald = 6.01, p = .01 (Table 1). Older age and religious attendance also independently predicted belief in God; Agreeableness and systemizing were statistically marginal predictors (Table 1). PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Table 1. Logistic Regression Model Predicting High Belief in God (Study 3, N = 706). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036880.t001