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The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents.

ABSTRACT: The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a "religious" or a "fictional" agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous-violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge-and fewer abilities that violated folk physics and biology. Similarly, participants rated folk psychology violations provided by the experimenter as more characteristic of religious agents than were violations of folk physics or folk biology, while fictional agents showed no clear pattern. Religious agents were also judged as more potentially beneficial, and more ambivalent (i.e., similar ratings of benefit and harm), than fictional agents, regardless of whether the agents were invented or well-known to participants. Together, the results support a motivational account of religious belief formation that is facilitated by these biases.

SUBMITTER: Swan T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6687181 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents.

Swan Thomas T Halberstadt Jamin J

PloS one 20190808 8

The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a "religious" or a "fictional" agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous-violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge-and fewe ...[more]

PMID: 31393944

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Project description:ObjectiveTo explore the issue of counterintuitive data via analysis of a representative case in which the data obtained was unexpected and inconsistent with current knowledge. We then discuss the issue of counterintuitive data while developing a framework for approaching such findings.DesignThe case study is a retrospective analysis of a cohort of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) patients. Regression was used to examine the association between perceived pain in the intensive care unit (ICU) and selected outcomes.SettingMedical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III, a publicly available, de-identified critical care patient database.Participants844 adult patients from the database who underwent CABG surgery and were extubated within 24 hours after ICU admission.Outcomes30 day mortality, 1 year mortality and hospital length of stay (LOS).ResultsIncreased pain levels were found to be significantly associated with reduced mortality at 30 days and 1 year, and shorter hospital LOS. A one-point increase in mean pain level was found to be associated with a reduction in the odds of 30 day and 1 year mortality by a factor of 0.457 (95% CI 0.304 to 0.687, p<0.01) and 0.710 (95% CI 0.571 to 0.881, p<0.01) respectively, and a 0.916 (95% CI -1.159 to -0.673, p<0.01) day decrease in hospital LOS.ConclusionThe finding of an association between increased pain and improved outcomes was unexpected and clinically counterintuitive. In an increasingly digitised age of medical big data, such results are likely to become more common. The reliability of such counterintuitive results must be carefully examined. We suggest several issues to consider in this analytic process. If the data is determined to be valid, consideration must then be made towards alternative explanations for the counterintuitive results observed. Such results may in fact indicate that current clinical knowledge is incomplete or not have been firmly based on empirical evidence and function to inspire further research into the factors involved.

Dataset Information

The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents.

Publications

The Mickey Mouse problem: Distinguishing religious and fictional counterintuitive agents.

Similar Datasets

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