Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

Will M. Gervais, Ara Norenzayan

Has this study been replicated?

The atlas records 3 replications of this study. Recorded outcomes: 2 failed, 1 mixed.

Revisiting the Relationship between Individual Differences in Analytic Thinking and Religious Belief: Evidence That Measurement Order Moderates Their Inverse Correlation, Finley et al. (2015). Outcome recorded: mixed. When religious belief is measured before analytic thinking, however, the negative relationship is reduced to non-significance, suggesting that the link between analytic thought and religious belief is more tenuous than previously reported. View paper
Direct replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012): No evidence that analytic thinking decreases religious belief, Sanchez et al. (2017). Outcome recorded: failed. We observed little to no effect of the experimental manipulation on religious belief (d = 0.07 in the wrong direction, 95% CI[-0.12, 0.25], N = 941). The original finding does not seem to provide reli- able or valid evidence that analytic thinking causes a decrease in religious belief. View paper
Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015, Camerer et al. (2018). Outcome recorded: failed. Despite high-power and careful adherence to the original study design with feedback from the original authors, we did not observe an effect consistent with the original study View paper