Tag: Psychology

A series of new experiments shows that analytic thinking can override intuitive assumptions, including those that underlie religious belief.

The absence of scientific evidence doesn’t dissuade those who believe childhood vaccines are linked to autism, or those who believe their headaches, dizziness and other symptoms are caused by cellphones and smart meters. And the presence of large amounts of scientific evidence doesn’t convince those who reject the idea that human activities are disrupting the climate.

Evolution may have delivered tendencies to believe certain things but that does not tell us whether those beliefs are true. There are risks in making up evolutionary “just-so” stories to explain the origins of complex human beliefs, such as religious ones.  Evolutionary biology will be of little help in “explaining” human beliefs in either quantum mechanics or the finer points of theology.

A study by Harvard psychologists show that people are happiest when they are living “in the moment” and focusing on the task at hand, and that daydreaming and thinking about the future or the past reduces happiness.

Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for the similarities between religions. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question…

Brain science is remarkably close to offering a full naturalistic explanation of individual religious experiences, everything from certain belief to moral indignation to mystical rapture to spiritual transformation. This article wraps up a series reviewing current knowlege and concludes that more and more supernatural explanations of religious experience are simply unnecessary.

Humans naturally create stories and narratives, says British author and neurologist Oliver Sacks. As a “non-militant atheist”, Sacks believes that the human mind is s story-generating machine, but that this story generating propensity needn’t be focused on Theistic themes and that much can be gained by using this faculty in the context of nature.

A long-running longitudinal study of Harvard College students that started in the 1930’s may begin to shed light on what factors are more conducive to happiness.  An example of scientific inquiry being used to examine issues that have traditionally been the domain of religion.

The way we think may be shaped by the culture in which we grow up, but the similarities between groups are far greater than the differences, says Ed Yong.

Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.