Our world is incredibly vast and culturally diverse. One of the evident ways in which cultures differ includes their religious beliefs, creating a rich array of expressions and practices.

Wandering through China, for example, you are likely to encounter marvelous Buddhist temples, whereas in Indonesia, mosques are the most common type of religious building. Similarly, in Spain and the UK, you can admire cathedrals, basilicas, and churches from different Christian traditions

Interestingly, while religions and their expressions vary culturally and geographically, there are also personal variations in terms of religious expressions and beliefs, and as you might guess, there are interesting associations between cognitive variables and people’s religious beliefs.

One example of those relationships is the extent to which people believe in god or gods (BiG) is related to the degree to which their thinking style tends to favor reflective or intuitive processes. In this context, it is considered that different people may more readily reason using a “reflective” way (considered to be effortful and controlled) or in an “intuitive” way (more automatic and less effortful).

According to the study authors (pictured below), religion is often associated with intuitive processes. In other words, a higher degree of intuitive reasoning tends to be associated with a higher degree of BiG. In contrast, increased reflective reasoning tends to be associated with a lower degree of BiG.

While described in various studies, this relationship is not entirely clear-cut. Some intercultural studies have found the association elusive (at least for some countries) or have reported puzzling results revealing associations in the opposite direction.

Noting that these inconsistencies may be partly due to differences in the way relationships are measured, the heterogeneity of samples in previous studies, and different approaches used for data analysis, the authors decided to pre-register a carefully designed study to test the association between BiG and intuitive/reflective thinking patterns.

In “Reflective thinking predicts disbelief in God across 19 countries”, published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, a journal of the Psychonomic Society, they analyzed data from more 7,000 participants.

The authors used a dataset based on a survey that included questions about attitudes towards mathematics and statistics, with questions about reasoning style and BiG appearing towards the end.

The BiG question was measured through a single item: “How strongly do you believe in God (or gods)?”, measured using a 100-point scale with higher scores reflecting a higher certainty that God (or gods) exist.

The type of cognitive reflection displayed by participants was measured by the “CRT”, which comprises 3 “trick questions” designed to cue an incorrect (but intuitive response that participants could answer correctly by engaging in more effortful and reflective reasoning.

For example, in the question “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” most people have the intuition that the response is 10 cents (which is incorrect), but if they engage in a more reflective reasoning, they can conclude correctly that the answer is 5 cents. For methodological reasons, the authors measured the results in two complementary ways, with the sum of correct responses as an index of reflective thinking, and the sum of incorrect responses as an index of intuitive thinking.

Testing the hypotheses using Bayesian and frequentist approaches, the authors found strong evidence on the relationship between the variables: Higher levels of reflective thinking predicted lower levels of BiG, whereas higher levels of intuitive thinking predicted higher levels of BiG.

As the figure below shows, a negative correlation between the reflective style of the CRT and belief in BiG was found (left panel).

The relationship is even clearer by observing the posterior Bayesian estimates in the figure below (left panel), where more negative estimates imply a negative relationship with BiG. The opposite panel can be seen in the right panels of these plots, supporting the idea that higher levels of intuitive thinking are associated with higher levels of BiG.

An additional hypothesis tested by the study, according to which presenting the CRT questions before the BiG item would tend to decrease it through a priming effect (i.e. by making participants temporarily more likely to engage in reflective thinking and therefore to show a decreased BiG) did not receive empirical support.

According to the authors:

“These results substantially increase our confidence that the negative association between reflective thinking and belief in God is robust, and further highlights that identifying the cause (or causes) of this association is a challenging scientific problem.”

Indeed, determining the practical consequences of this increasingly clear empirical relationship (despite a low effect size) is likely to be a focus of future studies in the authors’ view.

As for me, I’m sure that the next time I enjoy a trip where I visit iconic religious architectural landmarks, a fleeting thought about cognition and religion will cross my mind. After all, having read this paper, I have developed the (reflective-based) faith that soon we will have a better understanding of the mysterious ways in which reasoning styles and BiG relate to one another.

Featured Psychonomic Society’s article

Ghasemi, O., Yilmaz, O., Isler, O., Terry, J., and Ross, R.M. (2025). Reflective thinking predicts disbelief in God across 19 countries. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02691-9