Cognitive Style Tends To Predict Religious Conviction (psychcentral.com)
Participants who gave intuitive answers to all three problems [that required reflective thinking rather than intuitive] were one and a half times as likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence as those who answered all of the questions correctly.
Importantly, researchers discovered the association between thinking styles and religious beliefs were not tied to the participants’ thinking ability or IQ.
participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.
I think this is the source but I can’t be sure:
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-ofp-shenhav.pdf
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7o4/atheism_autism_spectrum/4vbc
There’s some serious spin in this paper. They use the words “intuitive” vs “reflective” to describe answers dozens of times, whereas they use “correct” vs “incorrect” less than a dozen… but reading the actual objective description of the study, it’s clear that a subject who intuitively gets the correct answer gets called “reflective” in the results, whereas a subject who reflects on the problem for a while but still gets the trick incorrect answer gets called “intuitive” in the results.
I don’t think the distinction between easily tricked and not easily tricked can be best described as if they were two equally valid options of “cognitive style”.
--”Why We Don’t Believe In Science”, Lehrer, New Yorker
So the beliefs of people in one country allow generalizations about “the human mind”.
You know, there aren’t anywhere near that many anti-evolutionists outside the United States. (Unless you count people in the Third World who haven’t heard of evolution in the first place.)
A quick check in Google for “worldwide creationism” suggests your faith is misguided.
I thought there is a negative correlation between Religiosity and IQ?
There can still be. It’s possible for there to be a correlation between thinking style and religiosity and a different correlation between IQ and religiosity, even if thinking style and IQ are uncorrelated.
Looks like this study was trying to focus on the former while filtering out the latter.
Ha, you’re right. I had to convince myself with a concrete example because it’s so counter-intuitive ( at least for me) .
Presumably the study showed that the analytic thinking effect was independent of the IQ effect; i.e. holding the level of IQ constant, one still sees the connection between analytic versus intuitive thinking and religiosity, versus a correlation between IQ and analytic thinking causing the entire effect to be the same. (I haven’t read the study this is just what I interpreted that quote to mean)
That’s the coolest part to me. I mean, we all think that the more analytic tend to atheism (see the autism thing), but to show you can make people more atheistic just by asking them to remember an analytic experience...? That is neat.
Do you know why your comment is in one line with a horizontal scrolling bar?
As a side note, can everyone see that, or is it just me? (I’m using Chrome)
It’s normal for me (Firefox on Mac)
It’s wrapped like normal for me (Chrome on Linux).
I really don’t know how people can correctly answer this on the fly! I have to solve {bat + ball = 1.10, bat = 1 + ball} to get the correct answer.
The way I started thinking about the problem is, you’ve got $1.10 to spend in total. $1 is spent on the difference between the bat and the ball. That leaves $.1 which is split evenly between the bat and the ball.
So what I end up doing is, as Tordmor says below:
1.10 − 1 = .10
.10 / 2 = .05
This is essentially the explanation given by wedrifid but I wrote it before reading his and tried to format it more consistently with your comment below.
Why is it split evenly? (I’m just wondering what your thought process is)
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I’m a bit weird with these sorts of arithmetic questions, my thought process went something like this: “Ok, 10 cents seems close, but that puts the bat at 90 cents more than the ball.. oh it seems like 5 cents and 1.05 works.” The answer just sort of pops into my head, not even thinking about the division step. Of course, I could do the simple maneuvering to get the answer, but it isn’t what I naturally do. I think this has to do with how I did math in grade school: I would never learn the formulas (and on top of this I would often forget my calculator) so I would rather come up with some roundabout method for approximating various calculations (like getting the root of a number by guessing numbers that “seemed close” to the root, usually starting at 1⁄2 the number and adjusting). Probably not really the best way to do things since there are much cleaner solutions, but this bad habit of arithmetic has sort of stuck with me through my mathematics degree (though I of course have picked up the relevant formulas by now!); instead of using the straightforward formula, I do this mental jiggling around of values and it pops into my head.
I don’t know, maybe that isn’t weird at all, but in any event no one has mentioned doing it yet.
A friend tried this on three of us earlier tonight (having read the same report). One out of three (all agnostics) got it right on the fly.
No you have to solve (1.10 − 1) / 2
The ‘No’ part changes it from a clever shortcut to just being wrong. You having a more finely tuned mathematical intuition doesn’t invalidate the rudimentary simultaneous equation.
I know that yields the correct answer but how do I know I should divide the expression by two from the problem statement?
You could just go at it the other way. Guess-and-check is one of the basic math strategies taught in schools, and is easy to apply to these questions:
‘I need something to answer this… 0.10 sounds good, but let’s check it first. 1+0.1 means the bat costs 1.10, and 1.10+0.10 = 1.2 - what a minute, that’s not 1.10! I better try some other values—I guess this isn’t so obvious after all!’
Right. I know how to get to a right answer but didn’t understand Tordmor’s expression.
Starting with
bat + ball = 1.10
bat = 1 + ball
substitute one into the other to eliminate it
1 + ball + ball = 1.10
simplify
1 + 2 ball = 1.10
then solve for ball
ball = (1.10 − 1)/2
then compute
ball = 0.05
This is literally how I would solve this problem. So you can see why I’m surprised people can answer it correctly on the fly.
The way it went in my head:
Huh, that’s obvious, it’s 1. Oh wait, ‘more than.’ So it’s half the remaining .10.
(Although I would say it took less time than reading that sentence takes.)
It’d be interesting if getting the wrong answer first is the quickest method of getting the right answer.
I recently read something like this, though I can’t remember where. The experiment went roughly like so:
Subjects were divided into two groups. In one, each subject was given 15 seconds to memorize an answer to a question for several seconds, and their performance recalling the answer later was recorded. In the other, each was asked to guess the answer, and was then given 7 or 8 or so seconds to memorize the correct answer. The time difference was to account for the time during which the second group’s members thought about the question.
So each person was exposed to the question for 15 seconds, in the first group, they were exposed to the answer for those same 15 seconds, in the second group, for half that.
The second group was better at recalling the answers.
I found a set of five experiments similar to the one I described. Getting the wrong answer first appears to be a good method to get to the right answer.
I get it, thanks!
You could do a couple of steps forward in solving the equations but the intuitive explanation is something along the lines of: Assuming the ball costs nothing the total comes to $1. If the total is more than that then it means that both the ball and the bat have an increased price by an equal amount. So the difference from $0 of the ball is going to be half the difference between the total and $1.
Related to the pareidolia point: Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers, Riekki et al 2012
Ironically, Razib Khan criticizes it for finding too small an effect size: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/10/which-results-from-cognitive-psychology-are-robust-real/ (LW post; I disagree that we should expect a large effect size, see comments on Khan.)
Relevant is Luhrmann’s 2012 When God Talks Back. I’ve made excerpts of what I thought were the most relevant parts for this topic: preface / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10
See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq6/on_the_etiology_of_religious_belief/
How is 5 correct?