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To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding
Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Littl...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MIT Press
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8563061/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34746617 http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00044 |
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author | Van Leeuwen, Neil Weisman, Kara Luhrmann, Tanya Marie |
author_facet | Van Leeuwen, Neil Weisman, Kara Luhrmann, Tanya Marie |
author_sort | Van Leeuwen, Neil |
collection | PubMed |
description | Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completion tasks, conducted in five settings that differed both in religious traditions and in language: the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. Participants everywhere routinely used different verbs to describe religious versus matter-of-fact beliefs, and they did so even when the ascribed belief contents were held constant and only the surrounding context varied. These findings support the view that people from diverse cultures and language communities recognize a difference in attitude type between religious belief and everyday matter-of-fact belief. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8563061 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MIT Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-85630612021-11-04 To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding Van Leeuwen, Neil Weisman, Kara Luhrmann, Tanya Marie Open Mind (Camb) Research Article Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completion tasks, conducted in five settings that differed both in religious traditions and in language: the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. Participants everywhere routinely used different verbs to describe religious versus matter-of-fact beliefs, and they did so even when the ascribed belief contents were held constant and only the surrounding context varied. These findings support the view that people from diverse cultures and language communities recognize a difference in attitude type between religious belief and everyday matter-of-fact belief. MIT Press 2021-09-10 /pmc/articles/PMC8563061/ /pubmed/34746617 http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00044 Text en © 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Van Leeuwen, Neil Weisman, Kara Luhrmann, Tanya Marie To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding |
title | To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding |
title_full | To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding |
title_fullStr | To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding |
title_full_unstemmed | To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding |
title_short | To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding |
title_sort | to believe is not to think: a cross-cultural finding |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8563061/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34746617 http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00044 |
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