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rug

(82,333 posts)
Wed Mar 23, 2016, 06:42 PM Mar 2016

Why Do You Believe in God?

Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern

Anthony Ian Jack, Jared Parker Friedman, Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis , Scott Nolan Taylor

Published: March 23, 2016DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149989

Abstract

Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with some aspects of social-emotional cognition. This leaves open two questions. First, is belief linked to social and emotional cognition in general, or a specific dimension in particular? Second, does the negative relationship between belief and analytic thinking still hold after relationships with social and emotional cognition are taken into account? We report eight hypothesis-driven studies which examine these questions. These studies are guided by a theoretical model which focuses on the distinct social and emotional processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders (mentalizing) and psychopathy (moral concern). To our knowledge no other study has investigated both of these dimensions of social and emotion cognition alongside analytic thinking. We find that religious belief is robustly positively associated with moral concern (4 measures), and that at least part of the negative association between belief and analytic thinking (2 measures) can be explained by a negative correlation between moral concern and analytic thinking. Using nine different measures of mentalizing, we found no evidence of a relationship between mentalizing and religious or spiritual belief. These findings challenge the theoretical view that religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to the perception of agency, and suggest that gender differences in religious belief can be explained by differences in moral concern. These findings are consistent with the opposing domains hypothesis, according to which brain areas associated with moral concern and analytic thinking are in tension.

Citation: Jack AI, Friedman JP, Boyatzis RE, Taylor SN (2016) Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0149989. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149989

Editor: Giuseppe Curcio, University of L'Aquila, ITALY

Received: October 23, 2015; Accepted: February 7, 2016; Published: March 23, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 Jack et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149989

Full paper at link, no paywall.

17 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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villager

(26,001 posts)
1. Can we define "God?"
Wed Mar 23, 2016, 06:46 PM
Mar 2016

White European dude in the sky moving everyone around like chess pieces? Heck no.

Latticework of unseen "spiritual" connections between humans, other aspects of existence, that are much larger than we can reckon, and which we can only still guess at? Well, yeah.

 

rug

(82,333 posts)
3. Unlikely they're testing a white European dude in the sky moving everyone around like chess pieces.
Wed Mar 23, 2016, 07:07 PM
Mar 2016

Feel free to do so.

This paper is about belief, specifically in "God and/or a universal spirit".

In the studies reported here, we examine the relationship between belief in God and/or a universal spirit and individual difference measures that characterize the domains of cognition of theoretical interest (in particular analytic thinking and moral concern).
 

villager

(26,001 posts)
7. All of Job is quite the interesting existential read.
Thu Mar 24, 2016, 03:13 AM
Mar 2016

And then of course there's that tacked on "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" ending (per the 50's original, as I like to call it), to make an essentially disturbing story palatable for contemporaneous audiences.

 

rug

(82,333 posts)
5. Growing up, I learned to fear Communism.
Wed Mar 23, 2016, 07:36 PM
Mar 2016

Upon mature reflection, I realized that was nonsense.

Fear, in the end, teaches the opposite.

 

rug

(82,333 posts)
11. I do not want to spend eternity with people who have gigantic bladders.
Thu Mar 24, 2016, 08:05 AM
Mar 2016

I have to draw the line somewhere.

jonno99

(2,620 posts)
16. Holy smokes ya got me - I just about blew my drink through me nose!
Thu Mar 24, 2016, 04:12 PM
Mar 2016

As always, thanks for your thought provoking dialog...

Jim__

(14,045 posts)
14. Because you have "moral concern" - is that the contention?
Thu Mar 24, 2016, 11:13 AM
Mar 2016

An excerpt:

...

We broadly characterize the social deficit associated with psychopathy as a deficit in moral concern <24>. The concept of moral concern is motivated by a basic distinction in moral philosophy between moral patiency and moral agency, which are associated with distinct moral sentiments of concern and blame, respectively <43>. Work in psychology also supports the view that perceptions of moral patiency are dissociable from (and sometimes in tension with) perceptions of moral agency <44–46>. In addition, we have shown that certain moral judgment tasks which hinge on perceptions of moral patiency are impacted by personality characteristics associated with psychopathy (i.e., deficits in empathic concern) but not by individual differences in mentalizing (i.e., deficits in theory of mind) <31>. Based on a review of this work, we identify moral concern as a broad category which includes empathic concern, interpersonal connection, prosocial behavior and aspects of moral reasoning. It is important to note that individuals with high levels of moral concern will not necessarily behave more ethically in all situations. Indeed, some researchers have claimed that high levels of empathic concern can be a detriment to moral behavior <47>. Further, there is empirical support for the view that moral concern for others can lead to aggression in the context of perceived threat <48>

Our theory, the opposing domains hypothesis <24, 29, 30>, holds that our neural architecture has evolved in such a way that it creates a tension between analytic thinking and moral concern. This contrasts with Baron-Cohen’s model, which emphasizes a tension between analytic thinking and aspects of social cognition impacted by ASD (i.e. mentalizing). Empirical support for our theory derives primarily from work in neuroimaging. First, reviews of the neuroscience literature, including formal meta-analyses, support the view that these two broad domains (analytic thinking and moral concern) map onto two anatomically discrete cortical networks. The task positive network (TPN) is consistently activated by cognitively demanding non-social tasks, including mathematical, physical and logical reasoning tasks <29, 49–53>. Individual differences in these skills are associated with increased TPN activation during these tasks <52, 54>. The default mode network (DMN) is consistently activated by social and emotional cognition <55, 56>. Our hypothesized broad cognitive category of ‘moral concern’, suggested to us by the personality profile of individuals with psychopathy, maps well onto the known functions of the DMN. Greater activity in the DMN has been associated with more empathic concern <57–59>, social connection (i.e. reverse of prejudice and disconnection) <30, 60–65>, prosocial behavior <60, 66, 67> and moral reasoning <68–70>. Notably many of these studies link individual differences in these characteristics to DMN activity <57, 59, 60, 66, 67>.

Second, it has long been known that the TPN and DMN exhibit an antagonistic relationship, in the sense that activation of one network corresponds with deactivation of the other network below resting baseline. Initially, it was observed that a broad range of cognitively demanding non-social tasks (which we characterize broadly as involving ‘analytic reasoning’) not only activate the TPN but also deactivate the DMN <50, 71>. It was later found that the TPN and DMN also tend to be in tension during ‘spontaneous cognition’, i.e. when the participant is not given any task <72>. This phenomenon is referred to as ‘resting anti-correlation’ between the networks. It suggests that competition between the networks is an emergent property of the network architecture of the brain. Finally, we have demonstrated that attention to engaging social stimuli not only activates the DMN but also deactivates the TPN. In a subsequent study<30> it was shown that this pattern of DMN activation and TPN deactivation was present for humanizing depictions of individuals, whereas dehumanizing depictions, which are associated with decreased moral concern, either involved decreased activity in the DMN or increased activity in the TPN. Taken together, these findings suggest that we are neurologically constrained from simultaneously exercising moral concern and analytic thinking.

We suggest that this structural feature of the brain underlies the long noted anecdotal tension between materialistic and spiritual worldviews. This linkage is supported by three observations. First, brain areas implicated in analytic thinking (TPN) support cognitive process essential for maintaining a naturalistic world view (e.g. thinking about objects, mechanisms and causes; <29, 49, 71, 73–77 > ), whereas the brain areas implicated in moral concern (DMN) are associated with thinking about phenomena which have traditionally been thought of as non-physical, namely minds and emotions <78–83>. Second, brain areas associated with materialism (TPN) tend to be suppressed when brain areas associated with moral concern (DMN) are activated <29, 71, 72>. This might explain the tendency to link mind with spirit, i.e. the view that minds and emotions are associated with the extra- or super- natural. Third, brain areas associated with analytic thinking are associated with religious disbelief <73, 74, 84>, and brain areas associated with moral concern are associated with religious belief <73> and prayer <84, 85>.

...


That may raise some hackles!
 

rug

(82,333 posts)
17. That it may.
Thu Mar 24, 2016, 05:02 PM
Mar 2016

I already see some headlines floating around reducing this study to correlating psychopathy with intelligence, as opposed to empathy versus less intelligence.

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