Religious Believers Do Not Distinguish Good from Poor Reasons for God’s Existence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12389223 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brittany A Cardwell (University of Otago), Jamin Halberstadt (0000-0002-8938-3495, University of Otago, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 147-160 |
| Publication date | 2019-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1050-8619 • E-ISSN: 1532-7582 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10508619.2018.1564446 |
| OpenAlex | W2918376971 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 42 |
Can people discriminate good from bad reasons for their beliefs about God? Research shows that religious believers favor intuitive processing, suggesting they may be less discriminating than nonbelievers. Indeed, in Experiment 1 and a replication, people listed 15 reasons for their beliefs about God, then evaluated the quality of either their first 3 reasons (presumably their best) or their last 3 (their worst); in both experiments, nonbelievers rated their good reasons as better than their bad reasons, whereas believers rated the 2 types of reasons equally. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this difference was limited to beliefs about God and was specific to believers’ own beliefs about God: Both believers and nonbelievers discriminated reasons for other people’s beliefs, as long as the reasons were congruent with their own. Whether cognitively or motivationally driven, our findings help explain why religious beliefs, in particular, are often immune to logical argument
Argument (complex analysis · Epistemology · Quality (philosophy · Religiosity · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Social Psychology
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Object categories and expertise
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Terror Management Theory
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The Argumentative Theory
Confirmation Bias
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Testing the causal relationship between religious belief and death anxiety
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Religious Fundamentalism and Terror Management
Reflective minds and open hearts
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| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |