Evolved minds in a secular world: A large-scale survey of supernatural beliefs in Denmark.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the prevalence, patterns, and demographic correlates of supernatural beliefs among 2,204 Danish adults, using data from a large-scale online survey conducted between November 2017 and February 2018. Despite Denmark’s reputation as a highly secular and educated society, supernatural beliefs remain notably widespread, ranging from 0.3% (vampires) and 12.3% (angels) to 30.1% (psychic essence). Belief in supernatural phenomena is not randomly distributed but forms meaningful clusters, including spirituality, magical thinking, metaphysical beliefs, openness to alternative beliefs, and scientific beliefs—the latter being negatively correlated with all supernatural categories. Findings reveal strong associations between belief patterns and demographic factors: women exhibit significantly higher levels of supernatural belief than men, who show stronger belief in science; higher educational attainment is linked to slightly lower levels of supernatural belief; and religious affiliation strongly predicts belief tendencies, with non-religious individuals reporting the lowest levels of supernatural belief and highest scientific belief. These patterns align with theories from evolutionary psychology suggesting that supernatural beliefs stem from evolved cognitive biases such as patternicity and agenticity, which can be influenced—but not entirely overridden—by cultural and educational structures. Cross-cultural comparisons indicate that while supernatural beliefs are relatively common in Denmark, they are less prevalent than in countries like the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. These results underscore the importance of cultural context in shaping belief systems and highlight the persistence of supernatural thinking even in secular societies.<br/>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".