Religion and analytic thinking

A controversial study found that encouraging analytic thinking also reduced religious belief. A replication attempt collected much more data to try to confirm the hypothesis; is it supported by the data? A simple randomized experiment with continuous outcome and demographic controls.

Motivation

In 2012, a study published in Science made the controversial claim that “Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief”: people who tend to think analytically report less belief in God. Moreover, the study reported on experiments in which subjects performed tasks intended to make them think more analytically, and found that afterwards, the subjects reported less religious belief.

This was controversial for the obvious reasons; in the spirit of good science, a separate team of researchers set out to perform one of the key experiments again, with a larger sample size, to test if the reported effect really exists. The original study included several experiments, but the new team focused on one testing whether visual priming (showing people images meant to evoke particular feelings) could have an effect on religious belief by priming people to think more analytically.

The experiment, conducted exactly as done in the original study, went as follows. Participants were told they were part of a study on memory, and shown four photographs: half saw photographs of Rodin’s famous The Thinker (intended to induce analytic thinking), and half saw photographs of Myron’s Discobolus, intended as a neutral control.

Then, in subsequent demographic questions, they were asked how strongly they believed in God, on a scale of 0 to 100 (0 meaning no belief and 100 meaning absolute belief).

The replication study collected several times more data than the original study, from four sites: a community college, a private Lutheran university, a private Catholic university, and online (via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service).

Data

Each row is one experimental subject, randomized to see either Discobolus or The Thinker.

Data preview

religion-analytic.csv

Variable descriptions

Variable	Description
condition	Whether the subject saw Discobolus (‘discus’) or The Thinker (‘thinker’)
site	Which site the subject was from
religious	Religious belief, from 0 to 100
age	Age of the subject, in years
gender	Gender of the subject

Questions

1. Perform basic EDA. Do the demographics of the participants differ by site? What is the distribution of religious beliefs?
2. Perform an analysis to determine if religious belief really does vary by condition, as claimed in the original study. Do your results match? What do you conclude?
3. Is there any evidence that the effect (if any) differs by site, age or gender?

References

The original experiment was: Gervais WM, Norenzayan A. (2012) Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. Science 336 (6080): 493–496. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1215647

The replication was: Sanchez C, Sundermeier B, Gray K, Calin-Jageman RJ (2017) Direct replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012): No evidence that analytic thinking decreases religious belief. PLoS ONE 12(2): e0172636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172636

Replication data obtained from https://osf.io/qc6rh/ and subsequently converted and cleaned.