Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.
Read the whole article at Thinking can undermine religious faith, study finds.
Here, as I understand it, is how the evaluated religiosity:
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.
(snip)
In the final experiment, students in the control group read text in a clear, legible font, while those in the other group were forced to squint at a font that was hard to read, a chore that has been shown to trigger analytic thinking. Sure enough, those who read the less legible font rated their belief in supernatural agents at 10.40 on a 3-to-21 scale, compared with 12.16 for those who read the clear font.
I’m not sure I get how that’s supposed to accurately measure religiosity. Are they saying that students who were “primed” with the less legible font, or the analysis-related words (in another experiment), were more likely to say “no” to the question “In my life I feel the presence of the Divine.”? (And, speaking of thinking analytically, how should I punctuate the end of that sentence?)
This confuses me, and I do recognize the irony in an All Up In Your FACE Religious Type like myself saying “math is hard! how experiment work?” I guess I can’t conceive of my answer to that question changing based on doing a crossword or a similarly analytical exercise. It seems like it would be more beneficial to give analytical tasks to two different populations who had the same IQ but were very divided in terms of religiosity – like, some monks and some atheists, or something, and see who does better. But then, of course, you’d have the issue of people saying “this whackadoodle cult over here doesn’t share my thought patterns just because we’re both very religious,” etc.
I don’t know – what do you think about this study, commenters? I’m not so much interested in the obvious disproving of the results (HEY! HERE’S A LIST OF CATHOLIC SMART PEOPLE!”) because, really, if a person is so ignorant as to argue there aren’t super-brains over on the Churchy side of the room, then I am not interested in talking to said person about this topic. But I would like to tease out whether this is even a good measure of what they’re trying to…measure.
The so-called ‘results’ are obviously disproved — to wit:
JOB
Jonathan Potter
Jonathan Webb
[Matthew Lickona]*
Quin Finnegan
Southern Expat
Don’t include me on that list, bub.
What a scam, though. There must have been some extra Soros research money floating around. There is so much that is so wrong with that experiment from a science standpoint. Why don’t they just measure body weight at the time of death to determine if we have souls.
It actually reminds me of those Weekly World News headlines that include the words “experts say.”
Chesterton was right in saying that the problem with unbelievers isn’t that they won’t believe, but that they’ll believe ANYTHING. Truly, we live in the dark ages.
This whole Science v Religion thing is tiresome enough, but to read about a “social psychologist” setting up experiments with type fonts and ancient sculpture to drive a wedge between Reason and Faith is beyond parody.
The term ‘religious beliefs’, as used by the reporter in paraphrasing social psychologist Gervais, is open to equivocation. A sense of the Divine or the numinous may be connected to a person’s subscription to this or that point of some religion’s doctrine, but a sense of the Divine and subscription to doctrine are (I think pretty clearly) distinct things. Yet each might be described as a kind of ‘religious belief’.
Here, I actually suspect that a sense of the Divine might correlate with what the article describes as ‘mental shortcuts’, ‘intuitive responses’, or ‘intuitive processing’, even if some other instances of sensing God’s presence are ‘legitimate’, not the result of ‘mental shortcuts’.
More on this point later, if I have the time and brainpower to hash it out after a (likely) long Monday.
To answer your question of whether these experiments are a good measure of what they are trying to measure, here is one experiment that seems to me especially flawed:
“Two additional experiments used word games rather than images. In one case, participants were asked to arrange a series of words into a sentence. Some were given neutral words and others were presented with trigger words such as “think,” “reason” and “analyze” to prime them to think more analytically. And indeed, those who got the “thinking” words expressed less religiosity on a 10-to-70 scale: They ranked themselves at 34.39, on average, while those in the control group averaged 40.16.”
It seems to me that this experiment shows how students can be primed to think according to what they read, but from the information provided here, they’ve ignored assumptions. For starters, there are the backgrounds of individual students. Perhaps more importantly, they’ve also ignored the background, or the culture, in which the study is conducted. In a world (namely, the UBC Dept. of Social Psychology) where words like “think,” “reason,” and “analyze” are lauded for their own sake, as well as opposed to religiosity (or whatever is used as an association with relgiosity), what other results can they expect? I’m honestly surprised it’s as even as “34.39″ to “40.16.”
“The cognitive origins of belief — and disbelief — traditionally haven’t been explored with academic rigor, said lead author Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.”
Hasn’t this been explored by the entire history of philosophy?
This whole experiment seems to suffer from an acute lack of theology, geometry, taste and decency.
Also, say whatever else you want about Thomas Aquinas, but was his not one of the greatest analytical minds ever?
And yet, it was all straw.
JOB
Beyond parody indeed.
You can’t psychologically analyze religious experience and religious experience is not the same as the “going to the gut feeling”.
The problem with this study is the academic ignorance of religion, esp in the social sciences.
Bleah.
The truest test of religiosity would, alas, not conform to the ethical standards of scientific research. (Put a gun to the subjects’ heads and promise to shoot them if they don’t deny their religion.)
I think there’s a much broader question psychological research: Not whether it can tell us anything meaningful about religion, but whether it can tell us anything meaningful at all about anything. I remain quite agnostic on the question.
Oh, my word – your name links to the Holy Tango book from back in the day at Modern Humorist. Kudos to you, sir.