tandfonline | In evolutionary approaches to religion it is argued that belief in
supernatural agents is strongly related to a perceptual bias to
over-detect the presence of agents in the environment. We report five
experiments that investigate whether processing concepts about
supernatural agents facilitates agency detection. Participants were
presented with point-light stimuli representing unscrambled or scrambled
biological motion, or with pictures of unscrambled or scrambled faces,
embedded in a noise mask. Participants were required to indicate for
each stimulus whether it represented a human agent or not. Each trial
was preceded by a supernatural agent prime, a human agent prime, or an
animal prime. Our results showed that primes referring to humans
facilitated the detection of agency. More importantly, however, results
did not reveal a general effect of supernatural priming on agency
detection. In three experiments, a moderating effect of religiosity was
observed: supernatural agent primes had a differential effect for
religious compared to non-religious participants on agency detection
biases and the speed of responding to agent-like stimuli. These findings
qualify the relation between supernatural beliefs and agency detection
and suggest that when supernatural agent concepts have been acquired
through cultural learning, these concepts can modulate agency-detection
biases.
