Analytic Thinking, Religion, and Prejudice: An Experimental Test of the Dual-Process Model of Mind

Abstract

Dual-process models of the mind, as well as the relation between analytic thinking and religious belief, have aroused interest in recent years. However, few studies have examined this relation experimentally. We predicted that religious belief might be one of the causes of prejudice, while analytic thinking reduces both. The first experiment replicated, in a mostly Muslim sample, past research showing that analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. The second experiment investigated the effect of Muslim religious priming and analytic priming on prejudice and showed that, although the former significantly increased the total prejudice score, the latter had an effect only on antigay prejudice. Thus, the findings partially support our proposed pattern of relationships in that analytic thinking might be one of the cognitive factors that prevents prejudice, whereas religious belief might be the one that increases it.

Can the activation of analytic cognitive style determine endorsement of secular belief?

“…Individuals who are primed to favor thinking analytically tend to have higher secular belief than individuals who are primed to disdain analytical thinking. This result seems to be consistent with previous experiments (Shenhav et al, 2011;Yilmaz et al, 2016) but inconsistent with findings from other experiments (Farias et al, 2017;Sanchez, Sundermeier, Gray, & Calin-Jageman, 2017).…”

Validation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in Turkey and its relation to cultural schemas of individualism and collectivism

“…Just as an analytic thinking prime can change the presumably stable religious beliefs (see Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012;Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012;Yilmaz, Karadöller & Sofuoglu, 2016), a contextual prime can change the presumably stable moral beliefs (see also Talhelm et al, 2015). The fact that the collectivism prime changed attitudes regarding loyalty might be seen as unsurprising since the prime specifically asks the participants to think about the groups they belong to and presumably directly activates thoughts of group loyalty.…”

Teleological explanation and positive emotion serially mediate the effect of religion on well‐being

“…Each of the samples comprised individuals of various religious affiliations, including substantial numbers of Christians (both Protestants and Catholics), Muslims, and those who identified as nonreligious. Although there has been an increase in the number of studies conducted in nontraditional samples and settings (e.g., Clobert, Saroglou, & Hwang, ; Ramsay, Tong, Pang, & Chowdhury, ; Yilmaz, Karadöller, & Sofouglu, ), the majority of psychological research investigating religious processes is still conducted in North America and Europe, raising the issue of cross‐cultural generalizability. Furthermore, the literature also suffers from an overrepresentation of Christian samples, with relatively few investigations in predominantly non‐Christian or religiously heterogeneous samples, which raises a similar question of whether all religious belief systems function in a similar way.…”