Onurcan Yilmaz

Analytic Thinking, Religion, and Prejudice: An Experimental Test of the Dual-Process Model of Mind

ABSTRACT Dual-process models of the mind, as well as the relation between analytic thinking and religious belief, have aroused interest in recent years. However, few studies have examined this relation experimentally. We predicted that religious belief might be one of the causes of prejudice, while analytic thinking reduces both. The first experiment replicated, in a mostly Muslim sample, past research showing that analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. The second experiment investigated the effect of Muslim religious priming and analytic priming on prejudice and showed that, although the former significantly increased the total prejudice score, the latter had an effect only on antigay prejudice. Thus, the findings partially support our proposed pattern of relationships in that analytic thinking might be one of the cognitive factors that prevents prejudice, whereas religious belief might be the one that increases it.

Analytic thought training promotes liberalism on contextualized (but not stable) political opinions

Previous research revealed that inducing an intuitive thinking style led people to adopt more conservative social and economic attitudes. No prior study, however, has shown a causal effect of analytic cognitive style (ACS) on political conservatism. It is also not clear whether these cognitive-style manipulations influence stable or contextualized (less stable) political attitudes differentially. The current research investigated the causal effect of ACS on both stable and contextualized political opinions. In Experiment 1, we briefly trained participants to think analytically (or not) and assessed their contextualized and stable political attitudes. Those in the analytic thinking group responded more positively to liberal (but not conservative) arguments on contextualized opinions. However, no significant change occurred in stable opinions. In Experiment 2, we replicated this basic finding with a larger sample. Thus, the results demonstrate that inducing ACS causally influences contextualized liberal attitudes, but not stable ones.

Political orientations, ideological self-categorizations, party preferences, and moral foundations of young Turkish voters

ABSTRACT Political ideology is often characterized along a liberal–conservative continuum in the United States and the left–right continuum in Europe. However, no study has examined what this characterization means to young Turkish voters or whether it predicts their approach to morality. In Study 1, we investigated in two separate samples the relation between young Turkish participants’ responses to the one-item left-to-right political orientation question and their self-reported political ideologies (conservative, socialist, etc.). In Study 2, we investigated the relation of moral dimensions as defined by Moral Foundations Theory to political party affiliation and political ideology. Results revealed that CHP, MHP, and AKP voters display a typical right-wing profile distinct from HDP voters. Findings regarding political ideology measures were consistent with party affiliations. Taken together, the findings reveal the distinctive nature of young Turkish people’s political orientations while supporting the predictive power of the one-item political orientation question.

When Science Replaces Religion: Science as a Secular Authority Bolsters Moral Sensitivity.

Scientific and religious thinking compete with each other on several levels. For example, activating one generally weakens the other. Since priming religion is known to increase moral behaviour and moral sensitivity, priming science might be expected to have the opposite effect. However, it was recently demonstrated that, on the contrary, science priming increases moral sensitivity as well. The present set of studies sought to replicate this effect and test two explanations for it. Study 1 used a sentence unscrambling task for implicitly priming the concept of science but failed to replicate its effect on moral sensitivity, presumably due to a ceiling effect. Study 2 replicated the effect with a new measure of moral sensitivity. Study 3 tested whether science-related words create this effect by activating the idea of secular authority or by activating analytic thinking. It was demonstrated that words related to secular authority, but not words related to analytic thinking, produced a similar increase in moral sensitivity. Religiosity level of the participants did not influence this basic finding. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that science as a secular institution has overtaken some of the functions of religion in modern societies.

Lower Levels of Resistance to Change (but not Opposition to Equality) Is Related to Analytic Cognitive Style

In recent years, there has been increasing research attention to cognitive style differences between liberals and conservatives. While some studies have found a negative relation between conservatism and analytic thinking tendency, others have not observed such a relation. None of these studies has measured the core motives underlying conservative ideology and investigated their relation with analytic cognitive style (ACS). We predicted that ACS is related to only one of the core motives underlying conservatism (resistance to change), but not the other (opposition to equality). This hypothesis was supported in three non-Western samples (total n = 1,552). This finding may clarify why some studies found a relation between cognitive style and conservatism, while others did not.

Different Types of Religiosity and Lay Intuitions About Free Will/Determinism in Turkey

ABSTRACT Religiosity has been found to be positively associated with belief in free will (FW) in the Western world. In the Muslim world, however, religiosity exhibits several characteristics that set it apart from the Western world, including an overemphasis on fate or divine predestination. We, therefore, investigated FW/determinism beliefs and different types of religiosity and conservatism in two samples in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country (N = 1,690). In Study 1, a confirmatory factor analysis showed that FAD-Plus provided good fit to the data. Study 2 revealed that FW belief is not related to any of the religiosity measures (intrinsic, extrinsic, quest), whereas fatalistic determinism is consistently related to religiosity. The unique predictor of free will turned out to be belief in a just world. Overall, these findings indicate that FW belief is not inherently related to religiosity in Turkey, whereas fatalistic determinism is central to Turkish people’s belief systems.

Meta-ethics and the mortality: Mortality salience leads people to adopt a less subjectivist morality

Although lay notions in normative ethics have previously been investigated within the framework of the dual-process interpretation of the terror management theory (TMT), meta-ethical beliefs (subjective vs. objective morality) have not been previously investigated within the same framework. In the present research, we primed mortality salience, shown to impair reasoning performance in previous studies, to see whether it inhibits subjectivist moral judgments in three separate experiments. In Experiment 3, we also investigated whether impaired reasoning performance indeed mediates the effect of mortality salience on subjectivism. The results of the three experiments consistently showed that people in the mortality salience group reported significantly less subjectivist responses than the control group, and impaired reasoning performance partially mediates it. Overall, the results are consistent with the dual-process interpretation of TMT and suggest that not only normative but also meta-ethical judgments can be explained by this model.

Relationships between core ideological motives, social and economic conservatism, and religiosity: Evidence from a Turkish sample

The “conservatism as motivated social cognition” approach posits two core ideological motives underlying political conservatism across cultures. However, there is a scarcity of tests from non-Western cultures, and much research has failed to distinguish between social and economic conservatism. Using a relatively large undergraduate sample from a non-Western, predominantly Muslim country (Turkey), we tested the associations among resistance to change and opposition to equality motives, social and economic conservatism, right-wing political orientation, and religiosity. In line with the “conservatism as motivated social cognition” account, we found that (a) social conservatism is more strongly related to resistance to change (rather than opposition to equality), (b) economic conservatism is more strongly related to opposition to equality (rather than resistance to change), (c) social conservatism is the strongest predictor of right-wing political orientation among other conservatism measures, and (d) political orientation and religiosity had divergent effects: While right-wing political orientation was related to economic conservatism, religiosity was inversely related to the latter, providing support for previous work indicating a resemblance between leftists and Islamists in Turkey. The results generally support the motivated social cognition approach to conservatism while also highlighting the importance of distinguishing between social and economic conservatism.

Is religion necessary for morality

ABSTRACT As a possible Hilbert question in the scientific study of religion, this article tries to explicate one specific relation between religion and morality: whether religion is necessary for morality. More specifically, how does the introduction of religion transform morality? The article operationalizes morality as normative and meta-ethical judgments and tries to specify ways to answer the question at three different levels: phylogenetic, historical, and ontogenetic. At the phylogenetic level, the possibility of moral judgments in non-human (and non-religious) primates is explored. At the historical level, a way to explore the question of how the rise of religions with Big Gods transformed morality is proposed. At the ontogenetic level, the effect of religious training in childhood and a shift to non-belief in adulthood on morality is explored. Finally, investigating the reverse causal influence (i.e., moral beliefs transforming religiosity) and the role of religious rituals (rather than religious beliefs) on morality are proposed as future directions.