The Experimental Investigation of Religious Cognition

Abstract

Religious cognition may be defined as the cognitive processes and representational states involved in religion-related knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, behaviours, and experience. Religious content and information processing occurs both at an intellectual, propositional level and also at an affect-laden, implicational level. Many questions are unanswered in our understanding of religious cognition, but fundamental to them all is the question of how religious cognition can be measured. Psychology of religion has primarily used questionnaires to measure religious belief, but many limitations suggest the need for new methods that can tap into implicational religious cognition, such as God schemas, as well as propositional religious cognition, such as God concepts. The purpose of this investigation was to explore which experimental paradigms most successfully tap into implicational religious cognition, and thereby add a new set of measurement tools to those available to the psychologist of religion. A consideration of research into the schematic representation of self and other persons suggested multiple hypotheses that could be tested using experimental paradigms adapted from the social cognition and cognition and emotion literatures. I present findings from a series of five experiments that measured cognitive biases in attention, memory, and judgement speed that were hypothesized to result from implicational religious cognition.Two experiments adapted the emotional Stroop paradigm to explore the possibility of a religious Stroop effect. While evangelical Christians, non-evangelical Christians, and atheists did not differ in interference when colour-naming emotionally valent religious material, in a subsequent unexpected recall test evangelicals showed enhanced recall for religious but not control material. Three experiments adapted the self-reference effect paradigm to investigate the accessibility and centrality of God schemas relative to self-schemas. Though evangelical and non-evangelical Christians had relatively similar propositional beliefs about the character of God, the pattern of evangelicals’ speed in making God-referent judgements and subsequent recall of God-referent material suggested that their God schemas were better-elaborated, more efficient, and more affect-laden than those of non-evangelicals. Atheists were able to draw consistently on two different concepts of God, but did so slowly and with poor subsequent recall, indicating that their God schemas were poorly elaborated, inefficient, and affect-free.Though much research exploring these biases is still to be done, the findings of the current investigation suggest that incidental memory and judgement speed paradigms are successful in tapping into implicational religious cognition and can reveal differences not otherwise observable through more direct measurement.

Measures of God representations: Theoretical framework and critical review.

“…The way respondents categorize the stimuli reflects their explicit (conscious) beliefs, whereas the speed with which they do so reflects the implicit (nonconscious) strength of these beliefs (Jong et al, 2017). Researchers have adapted property verification tasks to target particular research questions, such as exploring group differences in people's God representations (e.g., religious vs. nonreligious persons [Gibson, 2006]).…”

Growth in Adult Ego Development and Mentalizing Emotions for an Increasingly Multidimensional God Image

“…In the God Concept a person explicitly recalls a theological set of beliefs about God (Davis et al., 2013). These are propositional in nature with cognitively outlined theological representations of God from one’s head knowledge (Gibson, 2006). God Concepts come from one’s explicit thoughts, declarative knowledge, and one’s semantic memory (Kihlstrom, 2008; Siegel, 2012).…”

“…In contrast, God Image is a person’s heart knowledge of God as personally experienced (Gibson, 2006). It is an emotional and relational schema that underlies one’s experience with God (Baldwin, 1992; Bucci, 1997).…”

How the Non-Religious View the Personality of God in Relation to Themselves

“…Not surprisingly, there also seems to exist a difference in the perception of God and other religious figures between believers and atheists. And although it might seem that assessing the representation of God might not be applicable for atheists, research indicates that they are capable of holding a specific cognitive schema or identify a set of traits of God and other religious figures and that these concepts can be both salient and coherent [28], [29]. In some way it could be understood like holding a belief about the traits of any fictional character that you don't necessarily believe exists, such as characters from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or the characters from Game of Thrones.…”

“…Atheists and believers do however differ in the way they perceive God or other religious figures. For instance, Christian believers attribute more positive traits to God, whist atheists, although capable of drawing a stereotypically positive image of God, hold a more negative personal concept of God [28] and perceive God to be crueler [11]. In terms of assessing the personality of religious figures, Rouse [73] found Christian groups to endorse the image of Jesus as a person high in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, whilst atheists judged Jesus as having higher level of Neuroticism.…”