{"id":588,"date":"2012-10-22T11:52:49","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T15:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/?p=588"},"modified":"2013-08-21T17:05:41","modified_gmt":"2013-08-21T21:05:41","slug":"the-religious-brain-a-default-setting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/2012\/10\/22\/the-religious-brain-a-default-setting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Religious Brain: A Default Setting?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;Now there&#8217;s new research on this front\u2014and once again, it&#8217;s bad news for those who hope that we&#8217;ll someday elevate ourselves into an Enlightenment state where critical thinking becomes a default tendency. In a new study published in the <em>Journal of Experimental Psychology<\/em>, a team of scientists at Boston University find that even professional physicists are susceptible to one of the key mental defaults associated with religion\u2014namely, teleological or purpose-oriented thinking.<\/p>\n<p>The experiment involved a group of 80 physical scientists, who were compared to control groups of (1) college undergraduates; (2) college graduates who were the same age as the scientists, but did not have advanced degrees; and (3) scholars from the humanities (in a second study). All experimental participants were asked to judge the truth of a variety of short statements that contained false teleological explanations: e.g., &#8220;Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe,&#8221; and &#8220;Germs mutate in order to become drug resistant.&#8221; Critically, sometimes the participants were required to evaluate the statements very quickly, but at other times they were allowed to take their time and think it through&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/blog\/your-brain-politics\/201210\/the-religious-brain-default-setting\">Read the full article in <em>Psychology Today<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Psychology Today<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[216],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1715,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions\/1715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cdl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}