Interest in the cognitive aspects behind religious belief has increased in recent years, but researchers have collected little data concerning disbelief.
A new study, published April 27, showed that cognitive and analytical styles affect disbelief in God. The more analytical and thoughtful one is about their beliefs, the more their belief diminishes, even for devout believers.
Thinking, according to the study at University of British Columbia, increases disbelief among both skeptics and believers, shedding new light on the psychology of religion.
“Our goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,” said lead author Will Gervais, a PhD student in UBC's Dept. of Psychology.
“A combination of complex factors influence matters of personal spirituality, and these new findings suggest that the cognitive system related to analytic thoughts is one factor that can influence disbelief,” he stated.
The research used self-reported measures and subtle experimental priming, which included a picture of Rodin, The Thinker, and using questions that triggered one to think. The study involved 650 participants in both the United States and Canada.
The findings are based on a longstanding human psychology model of two distinct, but related cognitive systems to process information: an “intuitive” system that relies on mental shortcuts to yield fast and efficient responses, and a more “analytic” system that yields more deliberate, reasoned responses, Gervais said.
“Our study builds on previous research that links religious beliefs to ‘intuitive’ thinking,” said study co-author and Associate Prof. Ara Norenzayan, UBC Dept. of Psychology.
“Our findings suggest that activating the ‘analytic’ cognitive system in the brain can undermine the ‘intuitive’ support for religious belief, at least temporarily,” Norenzayan added.
This study will explore whether the increase disbelief was temporary or long lasting.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the study showed why some believe and some do not, stating that those who do not believe are more analytical and do not go with gut feelings. They said that thinking can cause belief to wane among both sceptics and believers.
The study, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicates that belief may be a more malleable feature of the human psyche than those of strong faith may think.
Belief and disbelief have not been study with academic rigor, until recent years, according to Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
"There's been a long-standing intellectual tradition of treating science as one thing and religion as separate, and never the twain shall meet," he said. But in recent years, he added, there has been a push "to understand religion and why our species has the capacity for religion."
Analytical thinking can override intuition and studies suggest that belief is rooted in intuition, according to Gervais.
To find out, his research team had college students perform three thinking tasks, each with an intuitive (incorrect) answer and an analytic (correct) answer.
For example, students were asked this question: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" The intuitive answer — 10 cents — would be wrong. A little math on the fly reveals that the correct answer would be 5 cents.
After answering three of these questions, the students were asked to rate a series of statements on belief, including, "In my life I feel the presence of the Divine," and "I just don't understand religion." Students who answered the three questions correctly — and presumably did a better job of engaging their analytical skills — were more likely to score lower on the belief scales.
Researches used the sculpture of Rodin or "Discobolus", the discus thrower, to see if analytical thinking did decrease belief. Researcher prompted those who viewed Rodin to think more analytically and those participants expressed decreased belief in God, scoring 41.42 percent out of 100. Those who viewed Discobolus scored higher on belief in God.
Researchers performed two additional tests, one with word games, and the other using text, with one group mentally forced to use analytical thinking skills. Those forced to use analytical thinking again scored lower concerning belief in God.
Because researchers randomly assigned individuals to analytical or control groups and results were consistent, Gervais believes it is unlikely that the findings resulted from one group being more religious than the other at the start of the research. Researchers also administered questionnaires a few weeks prior to the experiments and found no differences between the groups.
The results only showed a small shift from religious beliefs with those who were religious at the start of the experiment and the effects of the analytical-thinking manipulations were modest.
"We're not turning people into atheists," says Gervais. Rather, when the questionnaire responses of all subjects in an experiment are taken together, they indicate a small shift away from religious belief.
"It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe," says Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton University who has done pioneering work on the contributions of intuitive and analytical thinking to human decision making. "All they have shown, and all that can be shown, is that when you're thinking more critically you reject statements that otherwise you would endorse," Kahneman says. "It tells you that there are some religious beliefs people hold that if they were thinking more critically, they themselves would not endorse."
To Gervais and Norenzayan, the findings suggest that intuitive thinking, likely along with other cognitive and cultural factors, is a key ingredient in religious belief. Greene agrees: "Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion." He says, "If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe."
"In some ways this confirms what many people, both religious and nonreligious, have said about religious belief for a long time, that it's more of a feeling than a thought," says Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. But he predicts the findings won't change anyone's mind about whether God exists or whether religious belief is rational. "If you think that reasoning analytically is the way to go about understanding the world accurately, you might see this as evidence that being religious doesn't make much sense," he says. "If you're a religious person, I think you take this evidence as showing that God has given you a system for belief that just reveals itself to you as common sense."
