The Religious Brain: A Default Setting?
The Religious Brain: A Default Setting?
…Now there’s new research on this front—and once again, it’s bad news for those who hope that we’ll someday elevate ourselves into an Enlightenment state where critical thinking becomes a default tendency. In a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a team of scientists at Boston University find that even professional physicists are susceptible to one of the key mental defaults associated with religion—namely, teleological or purpose-oriented thinking.
The experiment involved a group of 80 physical scientists, who were compared to control groups of (1) college undergraduates; (2) college graduates who were the same age as the scientists, but did not have advanced degrees; and (3) scholars from the humanities (in a second study). All experimental participants were asked to judge the truth of a variety of short statements that contained false teleological explanations: e.g., “Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe,” and “Germs mutate in order to become drug resistant.” Critically, sometimes the participants were required to evaluate the statements very quickly, but at other times they were allowed to take their time and think it through…
