TY - JOUR
T1 - The devil's advocate
T2 - Secular arguments diminish both implicit and explicit religious belief
AU - Shariff, Azim F.
AU - Cohen, Adam
AU - Norenzayan, Ara
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada via a fellowship to the first author (767-2006-1980) and a grant to the third, and a Templeton Advanced Research Program grant from the Metanexus Institute.
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - The religion-science debate has heated up in recent years, with polemical arguments on both side decrying the other. Given that the dominant view is of religiousness as a relatively fixed personality trait, all of this furor seems excessive. Interested in just how malleable religiousness is, we exposed half of our participants to an argument against the existence of God by Richard Dawkins. Those exposed to Dawkins' arguments showed lower self-reported religiousness, as well as less implicit association between religion and truth. These results demonstrate the flexibility of trait religiousness.
AB - The religion-science debate has heated up in recent years, with polemical arguments on both side decrying the other. Given that the dominant view is of religiousness as a relatively fixed personality trait, all of this furor seems excessive. Interested in just how malleable religiousness is, we exposed half of our participants to an argument against the existence of God by Richard Dawkins. Those exposed to Dawkins' arguments showed lower self-reported religiousness, as well as less implicit association between religion and truth. These results demonstrate the flexibility of trait religiousness.
KW - Atheism
KW - Implicit associations
KW - Religiousness
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U2 - 10.1163/156853708X358245
DO - 10.1163/156853708X358245
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:63849198280
SN - 1567-7095
VL - 8
SP - 417
EP - 423
JO - Journal of Cognition and Culture
JF - Journal of Cognition and Culture
IS - 3-4
ER -