Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern.

Anthony Ian Jack,Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis,Scott Nolan Taylor,Jared Parker Friedman,Giuseppe Curcio

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149989

Anthony Ian Jack, Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149989

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Mar 23, 2016
Citations: 79	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Case Western Reserve University, Babson College

Abstract

Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with some aspects of social-emotional cognition. This leaves open two questions. First, is belief linked to social and emotional cognition in general, or a specific dimension in particular? Second, does the negative relationship between belief and analytic thinking still hold after relationships with social and emotional cognition are taken into account? We report eight hypothesis-driven studies which examine these questions. These studies are guided by a theoretical model which focuses on the distinct social and emotional processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders (mentalizing) and psychopathy (moral concern). To our knowledge no other study has investigated both of these dimensions of social and emotion cognition alongside analytic thinking. We find that religious belief is robustly positively associated with moral concern (4 measures), and that at least part of the negative association between belief and analytic thinking (2 measures) can be explained by a negative correlation between moral concern and analytic thinking. Using nine different measures of mentalizing, we found no evidence of a relationship between mentalizing and religious or spiritual belief. These findings challenge the theoretical view that religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to the perception of agency, and suggest that gender differences in religious belief can be explained by differences in moral concern. These findings are consistent with the opposing domains hypothesis, according to which brain areas associated with moral concern and analytic thinking are in tension.

Highlights

In the last decade, a number of theorists and experimentalists have attempted to address the question of what psychological mechanisms give rise to religious and spiritual beliefs
Study 1 examined a sample of 236 adults from the USA to test our hypothesis that religious and spiritual beliefs reflects a tension between moral concern and analytic thinking
To measure religious and spiritual beliefs we used the following single item measure in this and all following studies: “Do you believe in the existence of either God or a universal spirit?” This question was answered on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = not at all; 7 = definitely yes)

Summary

Introduction

Greater activity in the DMN has been associated with more empathic concern [57,58,59], social connection (i.e. reverse of prejudice and disconnection) [30, 60,61,62,63,64,65], prosocial behavior [60, 66, 67] and moral reasoning [68,69,70] Many of these studies link individual differences in these characteristics to DMN activity [57, 59, 60, 66, 67]. Study 8 demonstrates that the positive relationship between moral concern and belief is not due to socially desirable responding or the effects of social contact due to religious affiliation

Ethics Statement

Results and Discussion

General Discussion

Limitations