News |
Mind & Brain
A series of new experiments shows that analytic
thinking can override intuitive assumptions, including those that
underlie religious belief
By Marina Krakovsky
|
April 26, 2012 |
Image: Wikimedia Commons/innoxiuss
People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but
getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the
strength of their belief, according to a new study in
Science.
The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists
Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate
between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the
origins of belief and disbelief. "To understand religion in humans,"
Gervais says, "you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many
millions of believers and nonbelievers."
One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with
people's scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses
three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: "If it takes five
machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100
machines to make 100 widgets?" The first answer that comes to mind—100
minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out
the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more
analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the
researchers' tests of religious belief.
But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four
experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In
one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the
analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either
Rodin's
The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture
Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (
The Thinker
was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in
a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved
how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing
the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a
scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a
standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the
difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control
group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above
the scale's midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen
The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap
is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild
nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to
think.
Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It
exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of
people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of
reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface. Gervais and Norenzayan did
this by giving two groups a test of participants' belief in supernatural
agents like God and angels, varying only the font in which the test was
printed. People who took the belief test in the unclear font (a
typewriterlike font set in italics) expressed less belief than those who
took it in a more common, easy-to-read typeface. "It's such a subtle
manipulation," Norenzayan says. "Yet something that seemingly trivial
can lead to a change that people consider important in their religious
belief system." On a belief scale of 3 to 21, participants in the
analytic condition scored an average of almost two points lower than
those in the control group.
Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists
have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research
that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don't
simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. "Analytic
processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages
religious belief," Norenzayan explains.
Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene, who last year published a
paper on the same subject with colleagues Amitai Shenhav and David
Rand, praises this work for its rigorous methodology. "Any one of their
experiments can be reinterpreted, but when you've got [multiple]
different kinds of evidence pointing in the same direction, it's very
impressive."
The study also gets high marks from University of California, Irvine,
evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, the only former president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science to have once been
ordained as a Catholic priest, and who continues to assert that science
and religion are compatible. Ayala calls the studies ingenious, and is
surprised only that the effects are not even stronger. "You would expect
that the people who challenge the general assumptions of their
culture—in this case, their culture's religious beliefs—are obviously
the people who are more analytical," he says.
The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and
intuition have their place. "Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful,"
Gervais says, "and analytic thinking isn't some oracle of the truth."
Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in
the findings: "Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally
rational people who believe in God," he says. "Obviously, this study
doesn't prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to
believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational,
then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in
God?"
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