Do you believe in souls, ghosts, and the afterlife? If you do, then you're definitely not alone. According to a research conducted among U.S. population in 2011, more than 80% believe there is heaven and that 71% agrees with the existence of hell.

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A new study, however, gives us a different view of this belief system, such as why it happens to stick around even when we're adults and even when we say we already have a different belief about these concepts.

A psychology doctoral student conducted a research about implicit and explicit beliefs, especially with regard to soul and afterlife. Stephanie Langlin of School of Arts and Sciences in Rutgers University wanted to measure a person's implicit belief.

To do this, she worked with more than 345 psychology undergraduates, with 18 years as the mean age, who then answered a series of questions, such as what they believed about soul and afterlife when they were 10 years old and what they believed now.

Upon analysis, she discovered that the implicit beliefs of the respondents can be traced back to what they believed in when they were still children. Interestingly, it didn't matter what their religious affiliation is. However, there's a significant gap between their implicit and explicit beliefs, or what they say they believe about afterlife today.

This research, which she conducted while using the implicit association test, correlates to a 2009 experiments where researchers asked the subjects to sign a contract that sells their souls to the researchers for $2. According to her, almost no one from the respondents did even if they were told after that it wasn't a real contract.

Anglin, nevertheless, is aware of the limited scope of her research, such as how these beliefs can affect the person's belief or conviction on certain political and social issues. She believes that these limitations can give her the opportunity for further research and longitudinal study.

Her research has just been published in British Journal of Social Psychology.