Supernatural Attributions: Seeing God, the Devil, Demons, Spirits, Fate, and Karma as Causes of Events

Abstract

For many people worldwide, supernatural beliefs and attributions—those focused on God, the devil, demons, spirits, an afterlife, karma, or fate—are part of everyday life. Although not widely studied in clinical psychology, these beliefs and attributions are a key part of human diversity. This article provides a broad overview of research on supernatural beliefs and attributions with special attention to their psychological relevance: They can serve as coping resources, sources of distress, psychopathology signals, moral guides, and decision-making tools. Although supernatural attributions sometimes involve dramatic experiences seen to violate natural laws, people more commonly think of supernatural entities working indirectly through natural events. A whole host of factors can lead people to make supernatural attributions, including contextual factors, specific beliefs, psychopathology, cognitive styles and personality, and social and cultural influences. Our aim is to provide clinical psychologists with an entry point into this rich, fascinating, and often overlooked literature. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 19 is May 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Making sense of a transformative, mystical psychedelic experience: Will people frame it as spiritual, supernatural, psychological, physical, or a sign of mental illness?

“…An important implication of this finding is that physical or psychological explanations did not rule out interpretations that were spiritual or even explicitly supernatural. These findings echo a large body of work on supernatural attributions (Exline & Wilt, 2023; Legare et al, 2012) showing that supernatural and natural explanations often coexist, in part because many people see supernatural entities working via natural means.…”

“…Several recent, clinically focused articles based on a supernatural attribution framework (cf. Exline & Wilt, 2023) have described how people may frame reports of supernatural experiences, including demonic struggles (Exline, Pargament, et al, 2021) and perceptions of after-death communication (Exline, 2021), through different conceptual lenses. For example, if a psychotherapy client were to report seeing or hearing a deceased loved one, or being attacked by the devil, a therapist might interpret these experiences as hallucinations or delusions ( serious mental illness lens ), as normal psychological processes ( psychological or psychotherapy lens ), or as real encounters with spirits or evil entities ( supernatural lens ).…”

Accounting for the demonic: Helpful and unhelpful factors associated with belief in demonic etiologies of mental illness among evangelical christians.

“…This finding mirrors recent research which has explored social perceptions of the demonic among Christian groups (Lloyd & Panagopoulos, 2023). Demonic etiologies may therefore enhance proximate meaning making by providing an explanation of the source of the suffering along with a sense of hope that the suffering associated with mental ill-health will be alleviated by divine aid (Exline & Wilt, 2023; Lloyd et al, 2023).…”

“I see dead people”: Exploring the associations between watching horror and belief in the paranormal.

“…Cultural beliefs and norms are an important backdrop against which paranormal beliefs are formed (Exline & Wilt, 2023; Irwin, 1993). The cultural context within one grows up shape paranormal beliefs by prescribing how the world should be interpreted and which interpretations are considered “true” or real versus “false” or delusional (Baker et al, 2016; White et al, 2021).…”