A fascinating paper was just published in Psychological Science. Essentially, religious zeal is related to decreased responding in the anterior cingulate cortex in response to errors on a Stroop Task. The Stroop Task measures attentional control by having you read color words (e.g., green, brown, blue) that are presented in colors that are either congruent (e.g., “blue” in blue ink) or incongruent (e.g., “blue” in red ink). Greater discrepancy between congruent and incongruent trials — the “Stroop Effect” — indicates fewer attentional resources. Participants who were more religious made significantly fewer errors on the Stroop, but they also had a significantly larger Stroop Effect. Religiosity was measured in a number of ways across the 3 studies reported in the Psych Science article, including a manipulation of state religiosity to test for causality. The full text of the paper is available online from Prof. Inzlicht’s Website (click here).

These findings imply that at a neural level, the more religious you are the less your brain responds to behavioral inconsistency. To me, that’s downright fascinating, given a number of inconsistencies between some religious doctrines and policies that are supposedly based on these doctrines. Behavior and intention are not always a perfect match when it comes to religion. The larger Stroop Effect among religious individuals suggests they were less able to direct their attentional resources, but they were also more accurate. I’m curious about people’s thoughts and reactions to these findings …

RTFA: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM…

Newly published research by University of Toronto and York University professors points to reduced stress and anxiety among test subjects who consider themselves to be religious, compared with non-believers, when completing a task under pressure. As a result, the believers performed better on cognitive tests.

“[Religious people] were much less anxious and stressed when they made an error,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Toronto and a co-author of the study. “I don’t think this has to do with fundamentalism, it’s something deeper – religion provides meaning in peoples’ lives.”

But Prof. Inzlicht said that while a low level of anxiety can boost performance, it also functions as a sort of “alarm bell,” and too little activity in that part of the brain can hurt the ability to correct mistakes.

“The more they believe, the less brain activity we see in response to their own errors,” he said. In some ways, he added, “that’s a good thing. But on the other side, we need to know when we’re making a mistake. If we don’t, we may make the same mistake again.”