Belief bias during reasoning among religious believers and skeptics. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Abstract We provide evidence that religious skeptics, as compared to believers, are both more reflective and effective in logical reasoning tasks. While recent studies have reported a negative association between an analytic cognitive style and religiosity, they focused exclusively on accuracy, making it difficult to specify potential underlying cognitive mecha-nisms. The present study extends the previous research by assessing both performance and response times on quintes-sential logical reasoning problems (syllogisms). Those report-ing more religious skepticism made fewer reasoning errors than did believers. This finding remained significant after controlling for general cognitive ability, time spent on the problems, and various demographic variables. Crucial for the purpose of exploring underlying mechanisms, response times indicated that skeptics also spent more time reasoning than did believers. This novel finding suggests a possible role of response slowing during analytic problem solving as a component of cognitive style that promotes overriding intui-tive first impressions. Implications for using additional pro-cessing measures, such as response time, to investigate individual differences in cognitive style are discussed