It has been suggested by various scholars and theories that religiosity correlates with, even necessitates, poor conflict processing. This is because, in the eyes of many, religious statements are often contradictory, both internally and with regard to empirical observations about the natural world.
Despite these “cognitive conflicts”, believers tend not to lose their faith, leading many prominent scholars to hypothesize that some sense of conflict sensitivity must be blunted or dysfunctional. However, there are few studies directly testing this hypothesis, which was the goal of researchers from the University of Amsterdam in a recently published study appearing in Cortex.
The study included 214 student participants from the University who were asked to complete a series of Stroop tests while undergoing fMRI scanning. A Stroop test measures the delay in response time when processing incongruent signals. For example, the color red appearing in blue, or in the case of the present study, a male face being presented with a “female” title.
The authors hypothesized that, if religiosity correlates with reduced cognitive conflict sensitivity, such individuals would perform poorly on the Stroop test, both responding incorrectly more frequently and exhibiting longer pauses.
Contrary to the hypothesis, and as moderate to strong evidence against the aforementioned theories relating conflict sensitivity to religiosity, the two were found not to correlate in tests. Furthermore, according to the fMRI scans, both groups experienced cognitive conflict due to the Stroop test (meaning that the religious group was at least equally aware of the conflict).
As the authors note, conclusions should be drawn carefully. Null findings “may also reflect the paradox that highly robust experimental effects … are often difficult to relate to reliable individual differences.” In other words, “everybody Stroops” (pauses), meaning that differences between subjects may be so subtle as to be undetectable.
Furthermore, it may be (in fact, it seems very likely), that the kinds of cognitive conflicts elicited by the Stroop test differ greatly in nature and severity to those faced by religious believers. Context and content may make all the difference. As the authors say, it’s “important to do justice to the subjective nature of religious practices and experiences.”
However, these findings do throw doubt on theories that may have been too readily accepted by later authors and which haven’t been rigorously validated through empirical testing. If nothing else, the present study serves as sufficient evidence to reexamine theoretical conceptions about the nature of religiosity and how it relates to cognition.
The study, “Religious belief and cognitive conflict sensitivity: A preregistered fMRI study“, was authored by Suzanne Hoogeveen, Lukas Snoek, and Michiel van Elk.
