The study, which will appear in tomorrow\u2019s issue of\u00a0Science<\/em>, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike<\/strong>, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,\u201d says lead author Will Gervais, a PhD student in UBC\u2019s Dept. of Psychology. \u201cA 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<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Researchers used problem-solving tasks and subtle experimental priming \u2013 including showing participants Rodin\u2019s sculpture The Thinker <\/em>or asking participants to complete questionnaires in hard-to-read fonts \u2013 to successfully produce \u201canalytic\u201d thinking. The researchers, who assessed participants\u2019 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.<\/p>\n The findings, Gervais says, are based on a longstanding human psychology model of two distinct, but related cognitive systems to process information<\/strong>: an \u201cintuitive\u201d system that relies on mental shortcuts to yield fast and efficient responses, and a more \u201canalytic\u201d system that yields more deliberate, reasoned responses.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cOur study builds on previous research that links religious beliefs to \u2018intuitive\u2019 thinking,\u201d says study co-author and Associate Prof. Ara Norenzayan, UBC Dept. of Psychology. \u201cOur findings suggest that activating the \u2018analytic\u2019 cognitive system in the brain can undermine the \u2018intuitive\u2019 support for religious belief, at least temporarily.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Recent figures suggest that the majority of the world\u2019s population believes in a God, however atheists and agnostics number in the hundreds of millions, says Norenzayan, a co-director of UBC\u2019s Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture. Religious convictions are shaped by psychological and cultural factors and fluctuate across time and situations, he says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University of British Columbia press release via HealthCanal: A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[18,119,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2632,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions\/2632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Pondering.jpg\" "\\"thinking\\"")
A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers.<\/strong><\/p>\n