Priming analytic thought reduces expressed belief in God

Evidence

In one study, for example, we had randomly assigned participants look at various images of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker (figure 10.1). Other participants were shown images of an ancient Greek statue of a discus thrower, Discobolus. We picked these two sculptures because they are in many ways similar, except that The Thinker is emblematic of a thinking pose. This was a novel technique, so we did a separate test and found that, as expected, merely viewing The Thinker, compared to viewing Discobolus, caused participants to override intuitive answers in favor of logic in a subsequent syllogistic reasoning task. In this study, those who viewed The Thinker expressed less belief in God—they scored an average of about 41 on a 100-point scale, compared with an average of 61 for the group that viewed Discobolus. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 604

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the reader’s Norenzayan integration: the Big God mechanism is cognitively fragile, suppressible by analytic primes — relevant to comparing Rodrigues’ intellectualized faith against submissive belief. — connects to: Religious-belief effects are testable through temporary thought-priming experiments — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 133; Analytic thinking primes people to overrule quick intuition-based answers. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 601
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 604