Excessive teleological thinking is driven by aberrant associations and not by failure of reasoning

Summary

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 associative learning, but not by learning via propositional rules. Computational modeling suggested that the relationship between associative learning and teleological thinking can be explained by excessive prediction errors that imbue random events with more significance — providing a new understanding for how humans make meaning of lived events.

Graphical abstract

Highlights

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  People spuriously believe that events happen for a reason, but we do not know why

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  Kamin blocking can reveal the causal learning roots of excessive teleological thought

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  We need to distinguish between blocking via associations vs. propositional reasoning

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  Spurious teleological thinking correlates with associative, not propositional blocking

Abstract

Health sciences; Human activity in medical context; Association analysis