[Curtman]

Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief: UBC study

$1:

A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers.

The study, which will appear in tomorrow’s issue of Science, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief.

“Our goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,” says 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.”

Researchers used problem-solving tasks and subtle experimental priming – including showing participants Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker or asking participants to complete questionnaires in hard-to-read fonts – to successfully produce “analytic” thinking. The researchers, who assessed participants’ belief levels using a variety of self-reported measures, found that religious belief decreased when participants engaged in analytic tasks, compared to participants who engaged in tasks that did not involve analytic thinking.

The findings, Gervais says, 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.

“Our study builds on previous research that links religious beliefs to ‘intuitive’ thinking,” says 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.”

The study involved more than 650 participants in the U.S. and Canada. Gervais says future studies will explore whether the increase in religious disbelief is temporary or long-lasting, and how the findings apply to non-Western cultures.

Recent figures suggest that the majority of the world’s population believes in a God, however atheists and agnostics number in the hundreds of millions, says Norenzayan, a co-director of UBC’s Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. Religious convictions are shaped by psychological and cultural factors and fluctuate across time and situations, he says.

[Regina]

I can believe that.

[Guy_Fawkes]

Curtman Curtman:

Analytic thinking can decrease religious belief

[Zipperfish]

I wonder why they focused on religious beliefs, as opposed to spiritual ones.

[ShepherdsDog]

easier to target people of faith.

[Zipperfish]

I wonder if they consider "intuitve" thinking to be inherently non-rational. I've alwats considered it to be, but I'm not aware of any evidence on the issue. It could be advanced pattern recognition and recall, in which case you could argue that it is analytical.

The problem wiht the study is that seems to want to focus on a paticualr type of belief: religious belief. Moany people--most people evenb--believe in science and logic, aka anlytical thinking. I wonder if analytical thinking decreases belief in analytical thinking.

That's what happened to me. I've always been a hardcore scientist (by belief, as opposed to profession). But when I took the knife of logic to logic itself, it ebded up decreasing my belief in analytical thinking and made me more open to the idea of a more metaphysical reality (e.g. spirituality).

[ShepherdsDog]

It's funny that it didn't seem to impede many Jesuits and other teaching orders in their academic and scientific endeavours. For many, their faith was their motivation to search for answers.

[Curtman]

Impede? The study said that "thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers". You're getting defensive and reading things that aren't there.

Nobody is a target in this study. The sky is not falling.

[ShepherdsDog]

Seems to me you're getting 'hysterical' and reading things into the comment. I made a casual observation, using a couple important organizations, that seems to contradict the argument in the article. You've interpreted it in your own unique way.

[Curtman]

If you say so.

$1:

“Our goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,”

If you feel you've been targeted, you might be the hysterical one.

[raydan]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

I wonder if they consider "intuitve" thinking to be inherently non-rational. I've alwats considered it to be, but I'm not aware of any evidence on the issue. It could be advanced pattern recognition and recall, in which case you could argue that it is analytical.

The problem wiht the study is that seems to want to focus on a paticualr type of belief: religious belief. Moany people--most people evenb--believe in science and logic, aka anlytical thinking. I wonder if analytical thinking decreases belief in analytical thinking.

That's what happened to me. I've always been a hardcore scientist (by belief, as opposed to profession). But when I took the knife of logic to logic itself, it ebded up decreasing my belief in analytical thinking and made me more open to the idea of a more metaphysical reality (e.g. spirituality).

I've always thought that some scientists turn to religion/spirituality because science does not have all the answers. In this case, spirituality completes knowledge.

I have no problem not knowing all the answers myself, even with the fact that we'll probably never know. Maybe when I get to be your advanced age, Zip, I'll start looking at that spiritual stuff.

[andyt]

Spirituality is not about having all the answers. It's just as much a quest for knowledge and full of uncertainty as is science. In some ways more so because the discoveries aren't as universally accepted, they're of an individual nature. OTOH, when that intuitive system kicks in, it is possible to "know" something in a way that the analytically doesn't really offer. I think there's a 3rd system of knowing - being told what's true and just accepting it. Religion has a lot of that latter knowing in it for a lot of people - it's just comforting to think you've got the world figured out. Neither spiritual or scientific questers are much into that.

Here's what Ken Wilber has to say:

$1:

there are three ways of knowing.

"The first way, the analogical, describes Reality in terms of what it is like. It uses positive and finite qualities that are so overpowering that they can effectively hint at or point to the Absolute. ...


The second way, the negative, describes reality in a thoroughly negative way, since as St. Thomas pointed out, "we must proceed by the way of remotion, since God by his immensity exceeds every conception which our intellect can form." St Thomas thus called it the via negativa; and this way is what St. Dionysius termed the apophatic, which he likened to sculpture, for the "finished product" is arrived at only by chipping away all obstructions. ...


The third way is therefore an invitation, in the form of a set of experimental rules, to discover Reality for oneself. It is what G. Spencer Brown calls injunction, which he states:


is comparable with practical art forms like cookery, in which the taste of a cake, although literally indescribable, can be conveyed to a reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe. Music is a similar art form, the composer does not even attempt to describe the set of sounds he has in mind, much less the set of feelings occasioned through them, but writes down a set of commands, which if they are obeyed by their reader, can result in a reproduction to the reader, of the composer's original experience.

Thus Reality, just like all insights and experiences, is literally indescribable but it can nevertheless be indirectly pointed to by setting down a group of rules, an experiment, which, if it be followed faithfully and wholly, will result in the experience-reality."

BTW - Wilber followed a path that Zip describes. He was a grad student in Chemistry, and started questioning the assumptions of science, started lecturing his profs about it and finally dropped out.

[CanadianJeff]

Religious or not most of us participate in bullshit all the time that we don't think through.

For example paying 25 or 30 dollars for a cell phone case. it's just a piece of molded plastic that should be on the phone in the first place but instead of holding the company accountable we just fork over the cash.

Same thing with having company over and the dog decides to start having a "private" bath in the middle of your living room. No one ever says a word or thinks through the situation.

Did we learn nothing from men like George Carlin and James Randi on how easily we can be fooled on everything outside of religion as well?

[andyt]

Most of us take most things on faith. You have to. But, analytical thinking can certainly show that evidence for evolution is a lot stronger than for the literal interpretation of the bible. Which is the sort of thing the researchers are aiming at, (religion) rather than asking questions about the meaning of our existence and how we can come to a deeper understanding of it (spirituality). The problem with guys like Carlin and Randi can be that they just want to steamroll over those questions, because they also want to think they've got it all figured out. Not saying those two individuals in particular, but skeptics in general. Like atheists who are convinced they have hold of the truth and there can be not other truth than theirs. Denying 100% the existence of the transcendent is just as unreasonable as claiming 100% that your experience of it is the true one.

[ShepherdsDog]

Bill Maher said it best, in Religulous. Anything more than 'I don't know' is just arrogance.