nach oben

Journal of Religion and Health

Erschienen in:

10.06.2017 | Original Paper

What Makes You So Sure? Dogmatism, Fundamentalism, Analytic Thinking, Perspective Taking and Moral Concern in the Religious and Nonreligious

verfasst von: Jared Parker Friedman, Anthony Ian Jack

Erschienen in: Journal of Religion and Health | Ausgabe 1/2018

Einloggen, um Zugang zu erhalten

Abstract

Better understanding the psychological factors related to certainty in one’s beliefs (i.e., dogmatism) has important consequences for both individuals and social groups. Generally, beliefs can find support from at least two different routes of information processing: social/moral considerations or analytic/empirical reasoning. Here, we investigate how these two psychological constructs relate to dogmatism in two groups of individuals who preferentially draw on the former or latter sort of information when forming beliefs about the world—religious and nonreligious individuals. Across two studies and their pooled analysis, we provide evidence that although dogmatism is negatively related to analytic reasoning in both groups of individuals, it shares a divergent relationship with measures of moral concern depending on whether one identifies as religious or not. Study 1 showed that increasing levels of dogmatism were positively related to prosocial intentions among the religious and negatively related to empathic concern among the nonreligious. Study 2 replicated and extended these results by showing that perspective taking is negatively related to dogmatism in both groups, an effect which is particularly robust among the nonreligious. Study 2 also showed that religious fundamentalism was positively related to measures of moral concern among the religious. Because the current studies used a content-neutral measure to assess dogmatic certainty in one’s beliefs, they have the potential to inform practices for most effectively communicating with and persuading religious and nonreligious individuals to change maladaptive behavior, even when the mode of discourse is unrelated to religious belief.

Our rationale for investigating the relationship these two rather broad yet distinct psychological constructs share with (religious) belief was first explained in Jack et al. (2016). Empirical and theoretical support is discussed in this paper, in the section titled ‘Neuroscience reveals a tension between different types of thinking related to different belief considerations.’ The interested reader is directed to Friedman & Jack (accepted), where we advance a through theoretical and empirical account of the relationship between (brain areas underlying) aspects of analytic reasoning, aspects of moral concern and aspects of a more emotionally distanced sort of social cognition (e.g., theory of mind).

The distinction between nonsocial-working memory (e.g., manipulating numbers or alphabetizing names in one’s own mind) and social-working memory (e.g., manipulating mental states and personality traits in one’s own mind) is supported by work in neuroscience demonstrating that the former sorts of tasks activate TPN regions, while the latter sorts of tasks activate DMN regions (Meyer et al. 2015). Moreover, DMN activation during social-working memory tasks is related to behavioral performance on social tasks, such as perspective taking, while TPN activation during either sort of working memory task is unrelated (Meyer et al. 2015). Hence, there are clear neurological and functional (e.g., behavioral) dissociations between social and nonsocial-working memory systems.

The felt or experienced tension between competing inputs and beliefs (as well as methods for ameliorating such tension) is well documented by research on cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1962; Tavris and Aronson, 2008). We are not claiming that all sorts of cognitive dissonance can be traced to the relationship between these two networks. However, we refer the interested reader to other work that provides theoretical and empirical support for the notion that the tension between these two neural networks underlies many important—and experientially real—tensions pertaining to competing philosophical beliefs and their associated worldviews (Friedman and Jack accepted, 2012, Jack 2013; Robbins and Jack 2006).

While the three-item religiosity scale captures religious affiliation, as well as belief in certain core religious and supernatural concepts, we use the terms ‘religious’ and ‘nonreligious’ for ease of exposition and readership. This terminology is also used here because participants were divided into ‘religious’ or ‘nonreligious’ groups based on their answer to the single item asking which religious system they belong to (the average score from all three items is used in subsequent analyses). However, it is worth mentioning that this single-item measure likely addresses aspects of religiosity more broadly, beyond mere affiliation. For instance, those who identify with a religious affiliation likely adopt (some of) the relevant beliefs and practices, while the opposite would be true for those who are not affiliated (those who chose ‘not religious’). We fully acknowledge the inherent limitations with this approach to studying something as complex as religious belief and discuss some of these in the general discussion.

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.

Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (2004). Research: A revised religious fundamentalism scale: The short and sweet of it. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 14(1), 47–54.CrossRef

Anticevic, A., Cole, M. W., Murray, J. D., Corlett, P. R., Wang, X. J., & Krystal, J. H. (2012). The role of default network deactivation in cognition and disease. Trends in Cognitive Science, 16(12), 584–592. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012. pii.CrossRef

Bartra, O., McGuire, J. T., & Kable, J. W. (2013). The valuation system: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of BOLD fMRI experiments examining neural correlates of subjective value. Neuroimage, 76, 412–427.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Blair, R. J. R. (2005). Responding to the emotions of others: dissociating forms of empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations. Consciousness and Cognition, 14(4), 698–718.PubMedCrossRef

Blogowska, J., & Saroglou, V. (2011). Religious fundamentalism and limited prosociality as a function of the target. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50(1), 44–60.CrossRef

Bressler, S. L., & Menon, V. (2010). Large-scale brain networks in cognition: Emerging methods and principles. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(6), 277–290. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.04.004.PubMedCrossRef

Bzdok, D., Schilbach, L., Vogeley, K., Schneider, K., Laird, A. R., Langner, R., et al. (2012). Parsing the neural correlates of moral cognition: ALE meta-analysis on morality, theory of mind, and empathy. Brain Structure and Function, 217(4), 783–796. doi:10.1007/s00429-012-0380-y.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Caldwell-Harris, C. L., Wilson, A. L., LoTempio, E., & Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2011). Exploring the atheist personality: Well-being, awe, and magical thinking in atheists, Buddhists, and Christians. Mental Health Religion and Culture, 14(7), 659–672.CrossRef

Cooperman, A., Smith, G., A., Mohamed, B., & Schiller, A. (2014). Religion in everyday life: Highly religious Americans are happier and more involved with family but are no more likely to exercise, recycle or make socially conscious consumer choices. Retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/2016/04/12/religion-in-everyday-life/.

Coutinho, M. V., Redford, J. S., Church, B. A., Zakrzewski, A. C., Couchman, J. J., & Smith, J. D. (2015). The interplay between uncertainty monitoring and working memory: Can metacognition become automatic? Memory and Cognition, 43(7), 990–1006.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Crescentini, C., Di Bucchianico, M., Fabbro, F., & Urgesi, C. (2015). Excitatory stimulation of the right inferior parietal cortex lessens implicit religiousness/spirituality. Neuropsychologia, 70, 71–79.PubMedCrossRef

Crowson, H. M., DeBacker, T. K., & Davis, K. A. (2008). The DOG SCale: A valid measure of dogmatism? Journal of Individual Differences, 29(1), 17–24.CrossRef

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113.CrossRef

Dubendorff, S. J., & Luchner, A. F. (2015). The Perception of atheists as narcissistic. Rollins College Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program, 2015 Annual Report, 106.

Duncan, J., & Owen, A. M. (2000). Common regions of the human frontal lobe recruited by diverse cognitive demands. Trends in Neuroscience, 23(10), 475–483. doi:10.1016/S0166-2236(00)01633-7.CrossRef

Evans, J. S. B., & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 223–241.PubMedCrossRef

Falk, E. B., Berkman, E. T., Whalen, D., & Lieberman, M. D. (2011). Neural activity during health messaging predicts reductions in smoking above and beyond self-report. Health Psychology, 30(2), 177.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Festinger, L. (1962). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). California: Stanford University Press.

Fox, M. D., Snyder, A. Z., Vincent, J. L., Corbetta, M., Van Essen, D. C., & Raichle, M. E. (2005). The human brain is intrinsically organized into dynamic, anticorrelated functional networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(27), 9673–9678. doi:10.1073/pnas.0504136102.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Frederick, S. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.CrossRef

Friedman, J. P., & Jack, A. I. (accepted). Mapping cognitive structure onto the landscape of philosophical debate: An empirical framework with relevance to problems of consciousness, free will and ethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

Friedman, J., Jack, A. I., Rochford, K., & Boyatzis, R. (2015). Antagonistic neural networks underlying organizational behavior. In D. A. Waldman & P. A. Balthazard (Eds.), Organizational neuroscience (monographs in leadership and management) (Vol 7, pp. 115–141). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Galen, L. W., Smith, C. M., Knapp, N., & Wyngarden, N. (2011). Perceptions of religious and nonreligious targets: Exploring the effects of perceivers’ religious fundamentalism. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41(9), 2123–2143.CrossRef

Gervais, W. M. (2015). Override the controversy: Analytic thinking predicts endorsement of evolution. Cognition, 142, 312–321.PubMedCrossRef

Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science, 336(6080), 493–496. doi:10.1126/science.1215647.PubMedCrossRef

Goel, V. (2007). Anatomy of deductive reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(10), 435–441. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.09.003.PubMedCrossRef

Hall, D. L., Matz, D. C., & Wood, W. (2010). Why don’t we practice what we preach? A meta-analytic review of religious racism. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 126–139.PubMedCrossRef

Harris, S. (2014). Waking up: A guide to spirituality without religion. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Harris, S., Kaplan, J. T., Curiel, A., Bookheimer, S. Y., Iacoboni, M., & Cohen, M. S. (2009). The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief. PLoS ONE, 4(10), e0007272.PubMedCrossRef

Harris, S., Sheth, S. A., & Cohen, M. S. (2008). Functional neuroimaging of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. Annals of Neurology, 63(2), 141–147.PubMedCrossRef

Hunsberger, B. E., & Altemeyer, B. (2006). Atheists: A groundbreaking study of America’s nonbelievers. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Jack, A. I. (2013). A scientific case for conceptual dualism: The problem of consciousness and the opposing domains hypothesis. In J. Knobe, T. Lombrozo, & S. Nichols (Eds.), Oxford studies in experimental philosophy (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jack, A. I., Dawson, A. J., Begany, K. L., Leckie, R. L., Barry, K. P., Ciccia, A. H., et al. (2012). fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. Neuroimage, 66C, 385–401. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061.

Jack, A. I., Friedman, J. P., Boyatzis, R. E., & Taylor, S. N. (2016). Why do you believe in God? Relationships between religious belief, analytic thinking, mentalizing and moral concern. PLoS ONE, 11(3), e0149989.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Jack, A. I., Robbins, P., Friedman, J. P., & Meyers, C. D. (2014). More than a feeling: counterintuitive effects of compassion on moral judgment. Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, 125): Continuum.

Johnson, K. A., Li, Y. J., Cohen, A. B., & Okun, M. A. (2013). Friends in high places: The influence of authoritarian and benevolent god-concepts on social attitudes and behaviors. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 5(1), 15.CrossRef

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Macmillan.

Keller, J., & Pfattheicher, S. (2013). The compassion-hostility paradox the interplay of vigilant, prevention-focused self-regulation, compassion, and hostility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(11), 1518–1529.PubMedCrossRef

Koenigs, M., Kruepke, M., Zeier, J., & Newman, J. P. (2012). Utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathy. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(6), 708–714. doi:10.1093/scan/nsr048.PubMedCrossRef

Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., et al. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, 446(7138), 908–911. doi:10.1038/nature05631.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Krueger, F., Spampinato, M. V., Pardini, M., Pajevic, S., Wood, J. N., Weiss, G. H., et al. (2008). Integral calculus problem solving: an fMRI investigation. NeuroReport, 19(11), 1095–1099. doi:10.1097/WNR.0b013e328303fd85.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Leyens, J. P., Demoulin, S., Vaes, J., Gaunt, R., & Paladino, M. P. (2007). Infra-humanization: The wall of group differences. Social Issues and Policy Review, 1(1), 139–172.CrossRef

Lindquist, K. A., Wager, T. D., Kober, H., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Barrett, L. F. (2012). The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review. Behavioral Brain Sciences, 35(3), 121–143. doi:10.1017/S0140525X11000446.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Liu, C.-C. (2010). The relationship between personal religious orientation and emotional intelligence. Social Behavior and Personality: An international Journal, 38(4), 461–467.CrossRef

Lockwood, P. L., Bird, G., Bridge, M., & Viding, E. (2013). Dissecting empathy: high levels of psychopathic and autistic traits are characterized by difficulties in different social information processing domains. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7, 760.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Łowicki, P., & Zajenkowski, M. (2016). Divine emotions: On the link between emotional intelligence and religious belief. Journal of Religion and Health. doi:10.1007/s10943-016-0335-3.PubMedCentral

Mars, R. B., Neubert, F. X., Noonan, M. P., Sallet, J., Toni, I., & Rushworth, M. F. (2012). On the relationship between the “default mode network” and the “social brain”. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 189. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2012.00189.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Marstaller, L., Burianová, H., & Reutens, D. C. (2016). Adaptive contextualization: A new role for the default mode network in affective learning. Human Brain Mapping, 38(2), 1082–1091.PubMedCrossRef

Meyer, M. L., Taylor, S. E., & Lieberman, M. D. (2015). Social working memory and its distinctive link to social cognitive ability: An fMRI study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(10), 1338–1347.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Morelli, S. A., Rameson, L. T., & Lieberman, M. D. (2014). The neural components of empathy: Predicting daily prosocial behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(1), 39–47.PubMedCrossRef

Norenzayan, A., Gervais, W. M., & Trzesniewski, K. H. (2012). Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal God. PLoS ONE, 7(5), e36880. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036880.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Pavey, L., Greitemeyer, T., & Sparks, P. (2011). Highlighting relatedness promotes prosocial motives and behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(7), 905–917. doi:10.1177/0146167211405994.PubMedCrossRef

Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335–346.PubMedCrossRef

Pennycook, G., Ross, R. M., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2016). Atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers: Four empirical studies and a meta-analysis. PLoS ONE, 11(4), e0153039.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Phelps, E. A., Delgado, M. R., Nearing, K. I., & LeDoux, J. E. (2004). Extinction learning in humans: Role of the amygdala and vmPFC. Neuron, 43(6), 897–905.PubMedCrossRef

Rameson, L. T., Morelli, S. A., & Lieberman, M. D. (2012). The neural correlates of empathy: Experience, automaticity, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24(1), 235–245.PubMedCrossRef

Rawls, J. (2009). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Robbins, P., & Jack, A. I. (2006). The phenomenal stance. Philosophical Studies, 127(1), 59–85.CrossRef

Rounding, K., Lee, A., Jacobson, J. A., & Ji, L.-J. (2012). Religion replenishes self-control. Psychological Science, 23(6), 635–642.PubMedCrossRef

Roy, M., Shohamy, D., & Wager, T. D. (2012). Ventromedial prefrontal-subcortical systems and the generation of affective meaning. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(3), 147–156.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Saroglou, V., Pichon, I., Trompette, L., Verschueren, M., & Dernelle, R. (2005). Prosocial behavior and religion: New evidence based on projective measures and peer ratings. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 44(3), 323–348.CrossRef

Saslow, L. R., Willer, R., Feinberg, M., Piff, P. K., Clark, K., Keltner, D., et al. (2013). My brother’s keeper? Compassion predicts generosity more among less religious individuals. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(1), 31–38.CrossRef

Schilbach, L., Eickhoff, S., Rotarskajagiela, A., Fink, G., & Vogeley, K. (2008). Minds at rest? Social cognition as the default mode of cognizing and its putative relationship to the “default system” of the brain. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 457–467. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.03.013.PubMedCrossRef

Schjoedt, U., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Geertz, A. W., Lund, T. E., & Roepstorff, A. (2010). The power of charisma—perceived charisma inhibits the frontal executive network of believers in intercessory prayer. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6(1), 119–127.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Schjoedt, U., Stødkilde-Jørgensen, H., Geertz, A. W., & Roepstorff, A. (2009). Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(2), 199–207.PubMedPubMedCentralCrossRef

Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Divine intuition: cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 423.CrossRef

Shulman, G. L., Fiez, J. A., Corbetta, M., Buckner, R. L., Miezin, F. M., Raichle, M. E., et al. (1997). Common blood flow changes across visual tasks: II. Decreases in cerebral cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9(5), 648–663. doi:10.1162/jocn.1997.9.5.648.PubMedCrossRef

Smith, H., & Marranca, R. (2009). The world’s religions. New York: HarperOne.

Spreng, R. N., Mar, R. A., & Kim, A. S. (2009). The common neural basis of autobiographical memory, prospection, navigation, theory of mind, and the default mode: a quantitative meta-analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(3), 489–510. doi:10.1162/jocn.2008.21029.PubMedCrossRef

Stupple, E. J., Gale, M., & Richmond, C. (2013). Working memory, cognitive miserliness and logic as predictors of performance on the cognitive reflection test. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 35th annual conference of the cognitive science society.

Tarrant, M., Dazeley, S., & Cottom, T. (2009). Social categorization and empathy for outgroup members. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48(3), 427–446.PubMedCrossRef

Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2008). Mistakes were made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Tompson, S., Lieberman, M. D., & Falk, E. B. (2015). Grounding the neuroscience of behavior change in the sociocultural context. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 5, 58–63.CrossRef

Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (2011). The cognitive reflection test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks. Memory and Cognition, 39(7), 1275–1289.PubMedCrossRef

van Elk, M., & Aleman, A. (2016). Brain mechanisms in religion and spirituality: An integrative predictive processing framework. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 73, 359–378.PubMedCrossRef

Van Overwalle, F. (2011). A dissociation between social mentalizing and general reasoning. Neuroimage, 54(2), 1589–1599.PubMedCrossRef

Vezich, S., Falk, E., & Lieberman, M. (2015). Persuasion neuroscience: New potential to test dual process theories. In E. Harmon-Jones & M. Inzlicht (Eds.), Social Neuroscience: Biological approaches to social Psychology. New York: Psychological Press.

Wang, L., Zhong, C.-B., & Murnighan, J. K. (2014). The social and ethical consequences of a calculative mindset. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 125(1), 39–49.CrossRef

Zhong, C.-B. (2011). The ethical dangers of deliberative decision making. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(1), 1–25.CrossRef

Titel: What Makes You So Sure? Dogmatism, Fundamentalism, Analytic Thinking, Perspective Taking and Moral Concern in the Religious and Nonreligious
verfasst von: Jared Parker Friedman
Anthony Ian Jack
Publikationsdatum: 10.06.2017
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Journal of Religion and Health / Ausgabe 1/2018
Print ISSN: 0022-4197
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6571
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-017-0433-x

Springer Medizin

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu diesem Inhalt zu erhalten

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 1/2018

Self-Efficacy and Nutrition Education: A Study of the Effect of an Intervention with Faith Community Nurses

The Moral Injury Symptom Scale-Military Version

The Concepts of Hope and Fear in the Islamic Thought: Implications for Spiritual Health

The Role of Leadership Support in a Church-Based Cancer Education Implementation Study

Mantras Help the General Psychological Well-Being of College Students: A Pilot Study

The Ashtanga Yoga Hindi Scale: An Assessment Tool Based on Eastern Philosophy of Yoga