The dual-process model of the mind predicts that religious belief will be stronger for intuitive decisions, whereas reflective thinking will lead to religious disbelief (i.e., the intuitive religious belief hypothesis). While early research found intuition to promote and reflection to weaken belief in God, more recent attempts found no evidence for the intuitive religious belief hypothesis. Many of the previous studies are underpowered to detect small effects, and it is not clear whether the cognitive process manipulations used in these failed attempts worked as intended. We investigated the influence of intuitive and reflective thought on belief in God in two large-scale preregistered experiments (N = 1,602), using well-established cognitive manipulations (i.e., time-pressure with incentives for compliance) and alternative elicitation methods (between and within-subject designs). Against our initial hypothesis based on the literature, the experiments provide first suggestive then confirmatory evidence for the reflective religious belief hypothesis. Exploratory examination of the data suggests that reflection increases doubts about beliefs held regarding God’s existence. Reflective doubt exists primarily among non-believers, resulting in an overall increase in belief in God when deciding reflectively.
Keywords: reflection, intuition, analytic cognitive style, belief, belief in God or gods
4 Discussion
In both experiments, we found that reflection increases belief in God and that the effect is stronger among non-believers. Exploratory analysis suggested that the overall increase in religious belief is likely due to the religious self-questioning (i.e., reflective doubt) of non-believers who tended to revise their responses on the scale towards the middle point (i.e., “not sure”). The results also showed that those who make greater use of their reflective capacities (as measured by CRT-2) are less likely to endorse belief in God or gods. These results provide evidence against the hypothesis that intuition fosters and that reflection dampens religious belief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012; Yilmaz et al., 2016) but it converges with the longstanding correlational results demonstrating that tendency for reflective thinking is negatively associated with religious belief (e.g., Bahçekapili & Yilmaz, 2017; Gervais et al., 2018; Pennycook et al., 2016; Stagnaro et al., 2018; Stagnaro, Ross, Pennycook & Rand, 2019).Why does reflection increase belief in God in the current research? Our exploratory analysis strongly suggests that reflection, rather than directly increasing belief in God, increases doubt about one’s initial and intuitively held belief regarding God’s existence. It is likely that reflection increased religious belief in our overall sample because religious self-questioning is stronger among non-believers than among believers. On the other hand, we show that endorsement of agnosticism, deism, and polytheism is associated with both increase and decrease in belief in God, which may drive reflective doubt. Future research should try to experimentally distinguish this reflective religious doubt hypothesis implicated by our exploratory analysis from the reflective religious belief hypothesis. Nevertheless, we expect the effect of reflection on religious belief to be small because the belief in God question, as regularly used in the literature, will tend to probe stable opinions. Having answered the same question numerous times over the course of one’s life, participants are likely to know, as a defining characteristic of their personal identity, whether and to what extent they believe in God.
We also hypothesized but found no strong evidence that Pascal’s Wager may motivate a religious belief. Accordingly, reflected evaluation of the possibility of God’s existence could highlight the potentially infinite benefits of belief and costs of disbelief, hence questioning religious disbelief through a rational utility calculus. Although plausible, the tendency in our sample to agree with Pascal’s Wager did not clearly explain the reflected change in religious belief. However, our test was limited by the fact that religious believers (i.e., those with already high levels of belief) agreed with the Wager more than non-believers as well as by the fact that there were fewer atheists and agnostics in our sample.
An alternative explanation of the positive effect of reflection on religious belief may be that reflection makes people less extreme in their beliefs in general (i.e., religious and non-religious) but that openness to such self-criticism may be stronger among non-believers since they also tend to be reflective thinkers (Pennycook et al., 2016). Comparing religious and secular belief change among non-believers can therefore provide an explanation for our main finding. Likewise, Pascal’s Wager can be tested using improved methods, for example, by studying the effect of Pascal’s argument as an experimental manipulation. Finally, the two-stage procedure used in Experiment 2 was more insightful to studying religious belief change than the standard between-subject design of Experiment 1. The two-stage technique can be used in future studies of cooperation and morality in order to dissociate dual cognitive processes.
We also suggest that these experimental manipulations might have more influence on less stable beliefs or on those who are less confident about the existence of God. A similar distinction has been made in the field of political psychology (Talhelm, 2018; Talhelm et al., 2015; Yilmaz & Saribay, 2016, 2017). Activating reflective thinking did not have an impact on political opinions when they were measured by standard scale items based on identity labels (e.g., liberal or conservative), but it led to a significant change in less stable contextualized opinions (e.g., forming opinions about a newspaper article; Yilmaz & Saribay, 2017). A similar distinction can be made in the field of cognitive science of religion. For example, while belief in God, reflecting relatively stable opinions, may be more resistant to cognitive process manipulations, the relative reliance on natural vs. supernatural explanations for an uncertain event (e.g., the disappearance of airplanes in the Bermuda Triangle) may be more open to the influence of intuitive and reflective thinking. This possibility should be examined in future research.
A surprising contrast emerges from our data: the positive causal effect of reflection on belief in God vs. the negative correlation between individual tendency for reflected thinking and religious belief. While it is not clear why experimental and correlational tests lead to different conclusions, one may conjecture that the two approaches capture separate psychological mechanisms occurring across distinct time-frames. In particular, correlational measures may reflect self-selection of intuitively inclined people to religious belief (a long-term process of identity formation), while promoting reflection may isolate the possibly short-term effects of questioning one’s own and already established beliefs. While correlational findings are prevalent in the literature, there is a need for more experimental research on this topic. In particular, the generalizability of our results across cultures (e.g., using multi-lab experiments) is an open question.
In sum, recent failures to support the intuitive religious belief hypothesis suggested that the early evidence supporting the hypothesis is not easily reproducible. Using stronger manipulations and two large-scale experiments, we found that the effect of reflection and intuition on belief in God is in fact the opposite of intuitive belief hypothesis. Our results suggest that reflection on God’s existence may promote religious self-questioning, especially among non-believers.
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