Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non‐believers

Abstract

SummaryIllusory 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.

Being Watched by Anthropomorphized Objects Affects Charitable Donation in Religious People

“…Similarly, in Study 1B religiosity significantly predicted perceived face‐likeness of stimulus images, F (1, 92) = 13.48, p < .001, and the standardized slope was statistically significant from zero, β = 0.36, t (92) = 3.67, p < .001, yielding a medium‐sized effect, r = .36; R 2 = .13. These results suggest that the religious participants were more prone to perceive a face in everyday objects than less‐religious participants, which is consistent with a past finding (Riekki et al, ). Given that the pattern of results from the Japanese sample (Study 1A) was similar to that of the American sample (Study 1B), the association between religiosity and the anthropomorphism of everyday objects might be universal.…”

“…Study 1 showed the association between religiosity and the anthropomorphism of everyday objects, and the results were consistent with those of a previous study (Riekki et al, ). Indeed, another study reported no relationship between religiosity (specifically, belief in God) and anthropomorphism (Willard & Norenzayan, ).…”

Investigating the Role of Brain Lateralization and Gender in Paranormal Beliefs

“…Also, personal differences play a significant role in paranormal beliefs. These results support the effects of learning and culture on the paranormal beliefs in other studies (Riekki, 2013;Lindeman & Svedholm 2012). Therefore, studying the socio-cultural effects on supernatural beliefs can be helpful.…”

Linking paranormal and conspiracy beliefs to illusory pattern perception through signal detection theory

“…In line with our expectations and previous studies 30 , 31 , greater paranormal belief endorsement was found to be associated with an increased tendency to perceive patterns when there are none (false alarm rate), a more liberal response criterion and a decreased perceptual sensitivity—independent of image category or base rate. Furthermore, paranormal beliefs were not associated with a diminished miss rate—which one might expect in the case of a generally increased yes-say tendency—suggesting that this effect is selective for the perception of illusory patterns, and that the more liberal response criterion stems from the increased tendency to produce false alarms.…”