Abstract
A large body of previous research has found that people exhibit a cognitive bias to reason teleologically about natural kinds, explaining them in terms of intelligent design and inherent purpose. In the present study, we examined whether people are also cognitively biased to explain naturally occurring events in terms of inherent purpose (i. e., mistakenly attributing intentional design behind naturally caused life events), and if so, how explicit religious beliefs may interact with this implicit bias. A semi- structured interview was conducted concerning important autobiographical events. Overall, results indicated that differing levels of cultural religiosity (i. e., whether participants were from the relatively religious USA or the relatively secular UK) did not affect the tendency to reason teleologically. As predicted, explicit religious beliefs had an effect in that atheists gave significantly fewer teleological explanations than theists; however, half the atheists (n = 17) gave at least one teleological response and more than three- quarters (n = 26) gave a teleological response or admitted feeling conflicted between teleological intuitions and more rational, naturalistic explanations for significant life events. We interpret these results as suggesting that basic theory- of- mind competencies underlie the propensity to reason teleologically about major life events.