Psychological correlates of reasons for nonbelief: tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual humility, and attachment

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe process of acquiring beliefs – including the belief that there is no God–is largely implicit. We propose that psychological factors that function largely outside of conscious awareness make different conscious reasons for nonbelief more plausible to different people. The present study focuses on intellectual humility, tolerance of ambiguity and attachment and how they relate to stated reasons for nonbelief. The survey was distributed online to an international network of over 100 atheist, secular, and freethought organisations. As predicted, emotional reasons for nonbelief were positively related to anxious attachment, and intellectual reasons for nonbelief were inversely related to tolerance of ambiguity. We did not find evidence for our hypotheses that intellectual reasons for belief would be related to intellectual humility, or that uncertainty reasons would be related to tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual humility, and avoidant attachment. We unexpectedly found that early socialisation reasons for nonbelief were negatively related to intellectual humility.