Religiosity in high functioning autism


Recommended Posts

Oh brother, is this one going to be controversial.

Discover Magazine article....

Atheism as mental deviance

Tyler Cowen points me to a PDF, Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism, which has some fascinating results on the religiosity (or lack thereof) of people with high functioning autism. I've seen speculation about the peculiar psychological profile of atheists before in the cognitive science literature, and there's a fair amount of social psychological data on the different personality profile of atheists (e.g., more disagreeable). But there hasn't been a lot of systematic investigation of the possibility that autistic individuals are more likely to be atheist because they lack a fully fleshed "theory of mind" which would make supernatural agents, gods, more plausible.

You can read the whole paper yourself, but these two figures are the most important bits: (images attached)

>

Paper (PDF).....

Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism

Catherine Caldwell-Harris (charris@bu.edu)

Caitlin Fox Murphy (caitfoxmurphy@gmail.com)

Tessa Velazquez (tessav@bu.edu)

Department of Psychology, Boston University,

64 Cummington St. Boston, MA 02215 USA

Patrick McNamara (mcnamar@bu.edu)

Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine

72 E Concord St, Boston, MA 02118 USA

Abstract

The cognitive science of religion is a new field which explains religious belief as emerging from normal cognitive processes such as inferring others' mental states, agency detection and imposing patterns on noise. This paper investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high functioning autism being an extreme style that will predispose towards nonbelief (atheism and agnosticism). This view was supported by content analysis of discussion forums about religion on an autism website (covering 192 unique posters), and by a survey that included 61 persons with HFA. Persons with autistic spectrum disorder were much more likely than those in our neurotypical comparison group to identify as atheist or agnostic, and, if religious, were more likely to construct their own religious belief system. Nonbelief was also higher in those who were attracted to systemizing activities, as measured by the Systemizing Quotient.

>

post-347280-0-18877900-1316913899.png

post-347280-0-40870800-1316913911.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So if I understand right autistic people are more prone to be an atheist than the rest of the population. I think religion comes from what your parent taught you when young and the environment were you're raised. As you grow you get your own ideas as to what religion is and what not, not sure how being autistic or not will change the playing field for those ideas to be formed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, to test you would need a control group made up of autistic people who were brought

up in a highly religious environment, AND willing to give an honest answer about their

beliefs... regardless of what they practice in the face of their surroundings. I guess you

could promise to keep their identities and answers confidential... but good luck with that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.