To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding

Abstract

Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completion tasks, conducted in five settings that differed both in religious traditions and in language: the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. Participants everywhere routinely used different verbs to describe religious versus matter-of-fact beliefs, and they did so even when the ascribed belief contents were held constant and only the surrounding context varied. These findings support the view that people from diverse cultures and language communities recognize a difference in attitude type between religious belief and everyday matter-of-fact belief.

Keywords: belief; cognitive attitudes; credence; epistemic verbs; religious psychology; theory of mind; thinking.

Figure 1.

Study 1 results. Participants in all fieldsites were more likely to select “believe” (or its counterparts in other languages) to complete religious vs. matter-of-fact sentences.

Figure 2.

Study 2 results. Participants in all fieldsites were more likely to generate responses containing the word stem “believe” (or its counterparts) to complete religious vs. matter-of-fact sentences. This plot presents 13 word stems that include the six most common responses in each fieldsite, ordered by prevalence.

Figure 3.

Study 3 results. Participants in the United States, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu—but not Ghana—were more likely to select “believe” (or counterparts) to complete an attitude report when it was embedded in a religious (vs. matter-of-fact) vignette.