In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Furthermore, the percentage of Americans that believe in biological evolution has only increased by four percentage points over the last twenty years. Such poll data begs the question: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view. Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. And then there’s the irony of evolution: our views about our own development don’t seem to be evolving.

This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin.

To document the tension between new scientific concepts and our pre-scientific hunches, Shtulman invented a simple test. He asked a hundred and fifty college undergraduates who had taken multiple college-level science and math classes to read several hundred scientific statements. The students were asked to assess the truth of these statements as quickly as possible.

To make things interesting, Shtulman gave the students statements that were both intuitively and factually true—“The moon revolves around the Earth”—and statements whose scientific truth contradicts our intuitions (“The Earth revolves around the sun.”) As expected, it took students much longer to assess the veracity of true scientific statements that cut against our instincts. In every scientific category, from evolution to astronomy to thermodynamics, students paused before agreeing that the earth revolves around the sun, or that pressure produces heat, or that air is composed of matter. Although we know these things are true, we have to push back against our instincts, which leads to a measurable delay.

--"Why We Don’t Believe In Science", Lehrer, New Yorker

There's some serious spin in this paper. They use the words "intuitive" vs "reflective" to describe answers dozens of times, whereas they use "correct" vs "incorrect" less than a dozen... but reading the actual objective description of the study, it's clear that a subject who intuitively gets the correct answer gets called "reflective" in the results, whereas a subject who reflects on the problem for a while but still gets the trick incorrect answer gets called "intuitive" in the results.

I don't think the distinction between easily tricked and not easily tricked can be best described as if they were two equally valid options of "cognitive style".

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

I really don't know how people can correctly answer this on the fly! I have to solve {bat + ball = 1.10, bat = 1 + ball} to get the correct answer.

Importantly, researchers discovered the association between thinking styles and religious beliefs were not tied to the participants’ thinking ability or IQ.

I thought there is a negative correlation between Religiosity and IQ?

participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.

That's the coolest part to me. I mean, we all think that the more analytic tend to atheism (see the autism thing), but to show you can make people more atheistic just by asking them to remember an analytic experience...? That is neat.

Related to the pareidolia point: Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers, Riekki et al 2012

Illusory face perception, a tendency to find human-like faces where none are actually present in, for example, artifacts or scenery, is a common phenomenon that occasionally enters the public eye. We used two tests (N = 47) to analyze the relationship between paranormal and religious beliefs and illusory face perception. In a detection task, the participants detected face-like features from pictures of scenery and landscapes with and without face-like areas and, in a rating task, evaluated the face-likeness and emotionality of these areas. Believer groups were better at identifying the previously defined face-like regions in the images but were also prone to false alarms. Signal detection analysis revealed that believers had more liberal answering criteria than skeptics, but the actual detection sensitivity did not differ. The paranormal believers also evaluated the artifact faces as more face-like and emotional than the skeptics, and a similar trend was found between religious and non-religious people.

Ironically, Razib Khan criticizes it for finding too small an effect size: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/10/which-results-from-cognitive-psychology-are-robust-real/ (LW post; I disagree that we should expect a large effect size, see comments on Khan.)

Relevant is Luhrmann's 2012 When God Talks Back. I've made excerpts of what I thought were the most relevant parts for this topic: preface / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10

See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq6/on_the_etiology_of_religious_belief/