Analytic thinking style independently predicts lower religious belief.

Evidence

Participants who were more likely to overrule the intuitive answer were also less likely to believe in God. Shenhav and his colleagues were careful to consider other factors and ruled them out as potential counterexplanations. They showed that the lower levels of belief among the analytic thinkers were not because they had higher education levels, more general intelligence, different personality profiles, or higher income, or were older or younger, more liberal politically, or male. Analytic thinking even explained decreases in religious belief since childhood, suggesting that analytic thinkers tend to lose their religious fervor even if they were raised in a religious environment. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 602

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Directly extends the Big God mechanism discussion — cognitive reflection counteracts the intuitive appeal that makes gods cognitively cheap and credible in the first place.
• SEED: Angle: ‘why engineers, scientists, and rationalists self-select toward disbelief — and what that means for the cognitive appeal of Big Gods.‘

Related

• Religious disbelief is linked to a stable analytic cognitive style. (similarity 0.92)
• Religious disbelief correlates with analytic thinking independent of education, intelligence, or demographics (similarity 0.90)
• Inducing a merely analytic thinking style lowers stated belief in God. (similarity 0.90)
• Priming intuitive thinking temporarily raises belief in God. (similarity 0.89)
• Priming analytic thought reduces expressed belief in God (similarity 0.89)
• Priming analytical thinking via a statue causes an immediate religious belief dip. (similarity 0.88)
• Universities undermine religious belief by inculcating analytic thinking (similarity 0.86)
• Cognitive disfluency reduces religious belief across all conviction levels (similarity 0.86)
• Intuitive thinkers should be more religious and analytic thinkers more doubtful (similarity 0.85)
• The Cognitive Reflection Task measures analytic over intuitive thinking (similarity 0.85)
• Habitual analytic thinking produces and deepens religious doubt (similarity 0.85)
• Perceptual processing difficulty itself triggers religious skepticism. (similarity 0.84)
• Reduced mentalizing capacity directly lowers belief in God (similarity 0.81)
• Disbelief does not always require effortful rejection of intuitive theism. (similarity 0.81)
• Atheism lacks the intuitive support that religious belief enjoys. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Priming analytical thinking via a statue causes an immediate religious belief dip. #corroborates (0.95) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 604
• Perceptual processing difficulty itself triggers religious skepticism. #corroborates (0.80) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 605