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2009-10 FELLOW NICHOLAS EPLEY EXPLORES
HOW PEOPLE "READ" OTHER MINDS,
INCLUDING THE MIND OF GOD
 

Dr. Nicholas S. Epley, a residential Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS,) conducts research on the experimental study of social cognition, perspective taking, and intuitive human judgment. MORE DETAILS >>

STANFORD, CA, DECEMBER 9, 2009 — Ever find yourself thinking privately about whether another person approves of you, finds you trustworthy or even attractive?  How do we "read" other minds? 

One common strategy is to rely on our own.  Liberals tend to think other people are more liberal than do conservatives, producing a general tendency to assume that other people share our own views.  Recent research by Nicholas Epley demonstrates that this egocentric tendency is especially common when religious believers reason about the mind of God.   

Epley says that you don’t need to invoke the scientific method to note that people often seem egocentric when reasoning about God’s beliefs, but that you do need to invoke that method to say anything precise about it.  “Everyone from Greek philosophers to popes to Bob Dylan,” said Dr. Epley,” has noted that people seem to create God in their own image.  Our research doesn’t simply show this effect, but it also shows that the degree of egocentrism in religious beliefs is relatively unique, and larger than when people reason about other people’s beliefs.”  Epley notes that the most surprising aspect about this research for him was the degree of overlap in neural activation observed when reasoning about one’s own and God’s beliefs.  “Our whole brain analysis could not even detect any significant difference when people reasoned about their own versus God’s beliefs,” he says.  He is careful to point out that these results do not in any way deny that God’s presumed beliefs provide moral guidance for people when they are unsure of their own beliefs. 

“We think these experiments are interesting for a variety of reasons,” Epley says.  “One is that the same basic mechanisms that are used to think about other people’s minds also guide inferences about nonhuman minds, in this case God’s mind.  A second implication is that people’s religious beliefs may not only be a function of external sources, such as other people or religious texts, but also of an internal source of one’s own beliefs.”

Dr. Epley is a 2009-10 residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS.)  As a CASBS Fellow, he is continuing to write empirical papers about his laboratory group's ongoing research findings and also taking time to develop a broader book project on “mind reading.”  “Not the spooky kind of mind reading,” he cautions,” but the common and intuitive kind of mind reading where we wonder what others are thinking, liking, or believing.  We certainly make enough mistakes when doing this to allow for a considerable amount of improvement.”

"Nicholas Epley is a promising and exceptional scholar,” said CASBS Director Iris F. Litt, M.D.  "His work will have an important impact in advancing our understanding of human behavior." 

MORE ABOUT THE RESEARCH
Dr. Epley has written an article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs" with co-authors
Benjamin A. Converse, Alexa Delbosc, George A. Monteleone and John T. Cacioppo. 

ABSTRACT:
People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

READ THE ARTICLE >>
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO'S PRESS RELEASE ABOUT THE ARTICLE >>
NICHOLAS EPLEY'S WEBSITE >>

ABOUT DR. NICHOLAS S. EPLEY
Dr. Nicholas S. Epley is Professor of Behavioral Science and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  He received a bachelor's degree in psychology and philosophy in 1996 from Saint Olaf College. In 2001, he graduated from Cornell University with a PhD in psychology, where he earned a Graduate Teaching Award from the Department of Psychology as well as a Cornell University Teaching Fellowship. Epley became an instructor at Harvard University, where he was voted one of Harvard's "Favorite Professors" three years in a row. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2004.  MORE DETAILS >>

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