Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism

Abstract

Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of religious beliefs. To test this prediction, we assessed religious adherence with a widely-used religious fundamentalism scale in a large sample of 119 patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI). If the vmPFC is crucial to modulating diverse personal religious beliefs, we predicted that pTBI patients with lesions to the vmPFC would exhibit greater fundamentalism, and that this would be modulated by cognitive flexibility and trait openness. Instead, we found that participants with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) lesions have fundamentalist beliefs similar to patients with vmPFC lesions and that the effect of a dlPFC lesion on fundamentalism was significantly mediated by decreased cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility and openness are necessary for flexible and adaptive religious commitment, and that such diversity of religious thought is dependent on dlPFC functionality.

Keywords: Fundamentalism; Prefrontal cortex; Religious beliefs; Traumatic brain injury.

Figure 1

Lesion overlay maps of pTBI patients in the focal lesion groups (vmPFC, dlPFC, no PFC). Color indicates the number of patients with overlapping lesion at each voxel. Red indicates highest lesion overlap density and blue indicates lowest lesion overlap density. Images are in radiological convention: right hemisphere is on the reader's left.

Figure 2

Fundamentalism scores of the patient and healthy control groups. Patients with lesion predominantly in the vmPFC have higher fundamentalism scores than patients without vmPFC or dlPFC lesions. The diamond indicates the value of the group mean.

Figure 3

Results of the mediation analyses. The mediation analyses test the effect of A) Cognitive flexibility; and B) Openness on the relationship between dlPFC lesion and fundamentalism score while controlling for vmPFC lesion as a covariate. The diagrams show the coefficients ± SE of the path model significant at ***p<0.001, **p < 0.01 and *p < 0.05.