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[LINK] System 2 thinking decreases religious belief

5 Post author: maia 27 April 2012 01:36PM

This experiment, to be published in Science, used priming (cues like hard-to-read fonts, showing participants the sculpture The Thinker) and problem-solving tasks to induce "analytical thinking" in the participants, and found that it seemed to reduce their degree of religious belief. Participants not given such tasks showed no such reduction.

Their methods of quantifying "religious belief" aren't given in detail (a questionnaire, probably), so it may be interesting to see the actual article when it comes out.

Comments (3)

Comment author: DuncanS 29 April 2012 12:05:39AM *  3 points [-]

This seems very similar to the experiment where black people were shown to do worse on intelligence tests after being reminded that they were black..

So this experiment (in my view) doesn't really help to answer whether analytical thinking reduces religious belief. What it does show is that a lot of people make that association, and that is more than enough to cause the priming effect.

Comment author: Vaniver 27 April 2012 09:06:33PM 2 points [-]

Cute results make me wary, but it apparently had 650 participants. Will be interesting to see the effect size.

Comment author: jwhendy 03 May 2012 03:26:37PM 0 points [-]

Article is now out.