Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

Abstract

Overthinking Religion? Many theories of human cognition make a distinction between System I, which tends to be rapid and to rely on heuristics or rules of thumb, and System II, which tends to be more deliberative and analytic. This dual-process framework, within which both processes may operate simultaneously and competitively, has been used to explain a variety of situational influences upon decision-making. Gervais and Norenzayan (p. 493) studied the application of a dual-process framework to religious disbelief and found that triggering analytic thinking processes through a variety of experimental manipulations resulted in a tendency for subjects to report lower levels of religious belief.