The ability to identify oneself as the source of an action is the way that the self builds up as an entity distinct from the world and other agents. This ability is widely considered to be particularly robust when it comes to mental acts; who else but me could think a thought in my mind?  But in clinical populations, patients make exactly this mistake, misattributing their own self-produced thoughts to external agency.

These reports indicate a diagnostically important symptom of schizophrenia—the delusion of thought insertion.  While there exist a variety of etiological accounts of thought insertion, all argue that at the heart of this delusional belief lies a deeply anomalous experience of thought. In the present research I outline a distinctly different account of mental agency disruptions.  Motivated by ethnographic accounts describing thought insertion-like reports in religious contexts, I present preliminary evidence that prior belief in a plausible thought insertion mechanism, as well as expectation of specific thought content—especially emotional content—can lead members of the general population to misattribute even ordinary thoughts to external agency.

I discuss the implication of these findings for cognitive accounts of the sense of agency, and in light of both religious analogues of thought insertion and the continuum model of psychosis.