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The key results are shown in the figure. People who believe in a personal god are disproportionately likely to have got every question wrong. <\/p>\n

Pantheists, who believe in god as an impersonal force, did better. Deists, who believe in an impersonal god who does not intervene in the universe, did better still, and agnostics even better. Atheists were the most likely to give correct answers.<\/p>\n

So deep thinkers, even if they weren\u2019t atheists, were less likely to believe in the conventional idea of a personal god, and more likely to have unconventional religious ideas. Pennycook also showed that deep thinkers were less likely to be involved in religious activities, and that this could be explained largely on the basis of lower belief in a personal god.<\/p>\n

They also measured paranormal beliefs, and found that although these were broadly correlated with religious beliefs, many people are believers in either one or the other. Yet paranormal belief was also lower in people who got more questions right.<\/p>\n

Both of these effects \u2013 on religion and paranormal beliefs \u2013 held even after controlling for factors such as age, sex, education and IQ.<\/p>\n

In other words, conventional intelligence (problem solving, understanding words) was less important than having a considered, deliberative approach to problem solving.<\/p>\n

Now, you may interpret this as evidence that religious ideas are intuitive, but Pennycook disagrees. He suggests that the problem is that many religious ideas are actually counterintuitive. Deep thinkers maybe don\u2019t take these ideas at face value, and so are more likely to dig into the problem and so come to a different conclusion. <\/p>\n

$\"ResearchBlogging.org\"$ <\/a><\/span>
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J., Seli, P., Koehler, D., & Fugelsang, J. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief Cognition, 123<\/span> (3), 335-346 DOI: 10.1016\/j.cognition.2012.03.003<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

$\"Creative$ <\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"