Believing in the Da Vinci Code: Social-Cognitive Predictors and Correlates

Dr Miguel Farias talks about how culture can change what people believe about history.

The success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code novel was astonishing, as was the number of number of people who actually took seriously Brown’s rewriting of Christian history. After watching one documentary on people who had read the novel and had believed most of its contents, despite counterevidence by experts, two colleagues (N. Tausch and A. Newheiser) and I devised a scale of Da Vinci Code beliefs and a social psychological experiment to test for some of the possible psychological predictors of these beliefs. This study was conducted with Oxford University students who had read the novel shortly before the release of the film. The results are quite telling both regarding cognitive and affective predictors of such beliefs. I also believe they can help us understand and, to a certain extent, predict the societal growth of magical related ideas.

Miguel Farias is a researcher and lecturer in psychology. His major research interest is in understanding how spiritual and religious beliefs affect the way in which we perceive the world and ourselves. He has studied the psychological characteristics of New Age believers and the neural correlates of religious belief in relation to the experience of pain. Currently, he is completing a research project on the motivations and experiences of pilgrims at Pagan and Christian sites across Europe.

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