Religious belief rests on ordinary cognition that predates motivational influence.

Evidence

However, I am not claiming the far-fetched idea that religious belief arises from wishful thinking. It arises from ordinary cognitive operations and is intuitively compelling to begin with, even before our motivations shape their content. True, we don’t have brains that when hungry, imagine a refrigerator full of food. But neither do we have brains that see the world the way it is, undistorted by irrational hopes and wishful thinking. Indeed, hungry people see food-related words faster and more clearly than people who have just eaten (Radel and Clément-Guillotin, 2012). Studies show evidence for such unconscious wishful seeing (Dunning and Balcetis, 2013), and people are notoriously bad at separating reasoning from deeply held motivations, hope from expectation (see for example, Kunda, 1990). — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 898

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader mechanisms project — the claim that Big God beliefs emerge from ordinary cognitive machinery (not error or pathology) parallels how Rodrigues’ faith arises naturally before cultural pressure.

Related

• Ordinary cognition, not special modules, produces religious beliefs (similarity 0.88)
• Religious belief stems from both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission mechanisms. (similarity 0.86)
• Religious disbelief is linked to a stable analytic cognitive style. (similarity 0.85)
• Reduced mentalizing capacity directly lowers belief in God (similarity 0.84)
• Religious thought defaults while disbelief requires deliberate cognitive effort (similarity 0.83)
• Religious belief depends on mentalizing skills that imagine God’s mental states. (similarity 0.83)
• Religious belief is a by-product of cognitive predispositions, not an evolved adaptation (similarity 0.83)
• God concepts must first pass a cognitive hurdle before they can acquire anxiety-soothing functions (similarity 0.82)
• Atheism lacks the intuitive support that religious belief enjoys. (similarity 0.82)
• Belief-as-accident and belief-as-glue are rival traditions that need integration. (similarity 0.82)
• Beliefs change behavior only when they enter conscious awareness (similarity 0.82)
• Omniscient-god beliefs only change behavior when the deity is actively on the believer’s mind. (similarity 0.81)
• Inducing a merely analytic thinking style lowers stated belief in God. (similarity 0.81)
• Religious primes fail to affect atheists, disproving a purely ideomotor account (similarity 0.81)
• Religious belief persists through multiple independent sustaining mechanisms (similarity 0.81)