Episode 50: More Thoughtful - Atheists or Theists?

Also, here are the names and resources that were mentioned in the podcast:



Book: Thinking Fast & Slow by Danial Kahneman: http://amzn.to/2t7xtPz



Paper (free to download): "Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis": http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153039



Gordon Pennycook: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AIbJenwAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao



Will Gervais: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UZv6GGYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao



Ara Norenzayan: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_7PTKBMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao



Nick Byrd (byrdnick.com): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=d3prs2YAAAAJ&hl=en



I am happy to discuss this more online here or elsewhere.

Thanks for clairfying your results about a larger correlation between reflectivity and religiousity among PhDs in philosophy than others. That's helpful.



As for the hypothesis about the tradeoff between reflectivity and empathy, that seems plausible given what you mention about empathetic people being more likely to take the intentional stance.



And additional thought is this: I wonder if additional extant evidence supports a tradeoff between reflectivity and empathy. E.g., utilitarian responses to the trolley problem corelate with both reflectivity (e.g., Paxton, Ungar and Greene) and anti-social personality traits (Bartels and Pizarro: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21757191).

Hi Jonathan!

Hi Jonathan!

Something that Justin and I have been thinking about recently is what tradeoffs there might be with reflectivity that might also explain differences in thinking style between theists and atheists. Here is one hypothesis: being reflective trades off with being empathetic. Being more reflective goes along with being less empathetic. (And vice versa.) That would seem to go nicely with the differences in thinking styles, since empathetic people might have greater tendency to take an intentional stance towards things -- to project minds all over the place. Thoughts?

Interesting about the effect size decreasing for philosophers. Justin and I looked at some of our backlogged data and found that the effect size actually went up. Our estimate for the (Spearman) correlation between CRT-3 and (a one-item measure of) religiosity was around -0.37 restricting attention to people with a philosophy PhD. This was actually an increase in the correlation from what we found for our entire data pool.

Hey Nick,

I'm still arriving at $.10, guys.

I'm here!!!