People who recognize everyday patterns more likely to believe in god

Based on studies in the United States and Afghanistan, scientists recently published a paper showing that belief in a higher power is directly influenced by the keenness of a person’s implicit ability to perceive patterns.

Published in Nature Communications, the paper by Adam Weinberger, Natalie Gallagher, Zachary Warren, Gwendolyn English, Fathali Moghaddam and Adam Green describes the results of an international study performed to answer questions surrounding neurocognitive bases of individual differences in belief. They found that humans’ increased or decreased ability to recognize real patterns in the world based on unconscious processing of their environment directly connects to whether they believe that a higher power intervenes in the world. 

Citing previous work in cognitive science, the researchers said in the paper that unconscious learning of predictive patterns in the environment or implicit pattern learning (IL-pat) informs intuition, which in turn forms a bridge between unconscious and conscious levels of thought.  

It is the “knowing without knowing how one knows,” according to a quote by Seymour Epstein in the paper. People are more likely to consciously hold a belief if it is grounded in evidence gathered unconsciously, they said. As an example, the researchers describe how humans unconsciously process facial expressions to decide if a person is trustworthy.

Children begin implicit pattern learning at an early age. Being in a room where something happens repeatedly is an opportunity to unconsciously learn a pattern. Whether a person is a strong implicit learner can be influenced by genetics, according to the paper. The researchers said that IL-pat was found to be part of the reason why the strength of some people’s beliefs increases as they grow up.

Because different religions all share a belief in an intervening god, the researchers decided samples from culturally disparate religions would provide a good opportunity to test their hypothesis and show it transcended cultural influence. The scientists chose distinct samples from Washington, D.C., and Kabul, Afghanistan.

To calculate participants’ individual implicit learning levels, the researchers used a modified serial reaction time test (SRTT), a widely used test involving rapidly identifying positions of filled circles that are either random or sequenced, and analyzed each sample separately. To establish a connection between IL-pat and belief, participants were given an interventionist belief component score based on three measures including two tasks where participants were asked to use overlapping circles to represent how much they believed a god influenced life on earth. Finally, participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with statements concerning the presence of order (but with no mention of god or religion) in the universe.

Results of the study supported researchers’ hypothesis indicating a strong correlation between implicit pattern learning and belief in god in the U.S. and Afghanistan. Stronger implicit learners were more likely to see patterns in the world directing them to believe in god, while people who less easily absorb and process information unconsciously were less likely to believe in universal order orchestrated by a higher power. These findings were replicated in samples from Europe.

To measure if science could stand in for god as causality for universal order in relation to IL-pat, samples in Europe and Washington completed a belief in science scale. Results as reported in the paper indicated that implicit learning strength had no relationship to a belief in science as an explanation for universal order.