TITLE:
Atheists Score Higher on Cognitive Reflection Tests
AUTHORS:
Sergio Da Silva, Raul Matsushita, Guilherme Seifert, Mateus De Carvalho
KEYWORDS:
Cognitive Reflection, Religiosity, Atheism, Cognitive Psychology
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.2 No.12,
December
14,
2015
ABSTRACT: We administrate the cognitive reflection test devised by Frederick to a
sample of 483 undergraduates and discriminate the sample to consider selected
demographic characteristics. For the sake of robustness, we take two extra
versions that present cues for removing the automatic (but wrong) answers
suggested by the test. We find a participant’s gender and religious attitude to
matter for the test performance on the three versions. Males score
significantly higher than females, and so do atheists of either gender. While
the former result replicates a previous finding that is now reasonably well
established, the latter is new. The fact that atheists score higher agrees with
the literature showing that belief is an automatic manifestation of the mind
and its default mode. Disbelieving seems to require deliberative cognitive
ability. Such results are verified by an extra sample of 81 participants using
Google Docs questionnaires via the Internet.