ArticleiScience2023
Excessive teleological thinking is driven by aberrant associations and not by failure of reasoning.
Article in iScience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- 20 Years of Aberrant Salience in Psychosis: What Have We Learned?The American journal of psychiatry · 2025Review
- Delusional Unreality and Predictive Processing.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Paranoid and teleological thinking give rise to distinct social hallucinations in vision.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Different learning aberrations relate to delusion-like beliefs with different contents.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Teleological thought - the tendency to ascribe purpose to objects and events - is useful in some cases (encouraging explanation-seeking), but harmful in others (fueling delusions and conspiracy theories). What drives excessive and maladaptive teleological thinking? In causal learning, there is a fundamental distinction between associative learning versus learning via propositional mechanisms. Here, we propose that directly contrasting the contributions of these two pathways can elucidate the roots of excess teleology. We modified a causal learning task such that we could encourage associative versus propositional mechanisms in different instances. Across three experiments (total N = 600), teleological tendencies were correlated with delusion-like ideas and uniquely explained by aberrant
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.