Here’s Why Some People Are More Religious Than Others
It may have little to do with education; psychologists now believe that religiosity is linked to whether you solve problems intuitively or deliberatively
Tanya Basu @mstanyabasu
6:00 AM ET
When it comes to predicting the kind of people most likely to be religious, brainiac scientists used to be everyone’s last guess. The more educated a person was, the thinking went, the more likely they were to question the supernatural.
But the supposed divide between science and religion—in which religion was seen as the less-educated person’s “science” of choice—has ironically been subject to little scientific debate, until recently.
Several years before Pope Francis became pope of the Catholic Church in 2013, psychologists began to debunk the idea that being more educated meant a person was less likely to be religious. Instead, a new social psychology theory—one that had little to do with education level—arose. According to dual process theory, people are either deliberative or intuitive when they make decisions. People who are more deliberative tend to carefully think things through and find a rational reason for their choices, while people who are more intuitive do what appears to feel right.
David Rand, who leads Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory and studies decision-making, was one of the first to suggest that intuition and deliberation were key to a person’s religiosity in a paper he co-wrote in 2011.
http://time.com/4038407/religion-intuition-deliberation/
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-141-3-423.pdf
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