The reasoning and religiosity is underpinned by a bias for intuitive responses specifically when intuition and logic are in conflict
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Daws, Richard E
Hampshire, Adam
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
It is well established that religiosity correlates inversely with intelligence. A prominent hypothesis states that this correlation reflects behavioral biases toward intuitive problem solving, which causes errors when intuition conflicts with reasoning. We tested predictions of this hypothesis by analyzing data from two large-scale Internet-cohort studies (combined N = 63,235). We report that atheists surpass religious individuals in terms of reasoning but not working-memory performance. The religiosity effect is robust across sociodemographic factors including age, education and country of origin. It varies significantly across religions and this co-occurs with substantial cross-group differences in religious dogmatism. Critically, the religiosity effect is strongest for tasks that explicitly manipulate conflict; more specifically, atheists outperform the most dogmatic religious group by a substantial margin (0.6 standard deviations) during a color-word conflict task but not during a challenging matrix-reasoning task. These results support the hypothesis that behavioral biases rather than impaired general intelligence underlie the religiosity effect.
Date Issued
2017-12-19
Date Acceptance
2017-12-01
Citation
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017, 8
ISSN
1664-1078
Publisher
Frontiers Media
Journal / Book Title
Frontiers in Psychology
Volume
8
Copyright Statement
© 2017 Daws and Hampshire. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Sponsor
Commission of the European Communities
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000418338400001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Grant Number
PCIG9-GA-2011-293953
Subjects
Social Sciences
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Psychology
religiosity
reasoning
intelligence
cognition
conflict detection
INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES
FUNDAMENTALISM
INTELLIGENCE
COGNITION
DISBELIEF
MODEL
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 2191