title: Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis.
abstract: Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada.
authors.forename: Gordon
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pennycook
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, United Kingdom.|ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: Robert M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Ross
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada.
authors.forename: Derek J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Koehler
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada.
authors.forename: Jonathan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Fugelsang
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012067:Religion; D013850:Thinking