Why don't we worship Mickey Mouse like religious icons?

The "Mickey Mouse problem" refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural beings are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. Image / File

It's called the "Mickey Mouse problem" – an oft-cited paradox in religious psychology that looks at how some supernatural figures can be worshipped more than others.

Why, researchers have long asked, should there be any less devotion to, or belief in, the famous Disney character than traditional religious icons?

Now, a new study by New Zealand academics has shed a little more light on the question.

In a paper, just published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, Otago University's Dr Thomas Swan and colleagues asked around 300 people to invent their own religious or fictional being, and assign them five supernatural abilities.

Participants assigned religious beings a higher proportion of mind-based abilities, such as mind-reading or omniscience, which defied typical expectations about what our minds could do.

The "fictional" beings on the other hand, defied different kinds of expectations, such as having the ability to pass through walls, fly, or live forever.

Other significant differences included religious characters being judged as more potentially helpful, and being regarded as more ambiguous, meaning they had abilities that were less well-defined.

"The differences between fictional and religious beings all point to the idea that religious beings attract belief because we are motivated to believe in them," Dr Thomas Swan says. Photo / Supplied

"This ambiguity attribute is interesting as it gives people latitude to form interpretations of religious beings that are personally appealing and plausible," Swan said.

Whereas fictional beings were given character traits that defined them as heroes or villains, religious beings were more ambivalent and associated with similar ratings of benefit and harm, potentially making them capable of eliciting both love and fear.

The study found that these differences in attributes held up regardless of whether the agents were invented or well known to participants.

The findings also suggested that religious beings are psychologically attractive.

"The differences between fictional and religious beings all point to the idea that religious beings attract belief because we are motivated to believe in them," Swan said.

"They are appealing to us. They are psychologically useful."

The template created in the study is now being used for a larger model exploring what motivates religious belief.