Believing Is Seeing: Belief in Dualism Is Related With Illusory Pattern Detection

A recent study suggested that belief in dualism (DU) is related to basic social cognitive processes, such as detecting biological motion in noisy displays. However, dualistic beliefs are strongly related to paranormal beliefs, which are also correlated with biological motion perception. The question thus arises whether the previously found relationship between belief in DU and biological motion perception can be explained by paranormal beliefs and whether this relationship is unique to biological motion or reflects a more general tendency to see patterns in noise. We used signal detection theory to measure participants' ability to discriminate biological motion (Experiments 1 and 3) and random dot motion (Experiment 2) from scrambled background noise. Furthermore, the Free Will Inventory was used to measure the strength of three free will (FW)-related beliefs: belief in FW, belief in determinism (DE), and belief in DU. The Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS) was used to measure the strength of paranormal beliefs. Across the three experiments (N = 1,028), the results revealed that belief in DU correlated negatively with perceptual sensitivity and correlated positively with false alarm rate in both the biological motion and the random dot motion task. In addition, paranormal belief was found to explain the relationship between belief in DU and biological motion perception. The findings of this study suggest that correlations between belief in DU and biological motion perception are best explained in terms of a more general relationship between belief in DU and (illusory) pattern recognition.