Evidence that analytic cognitive style influences religious belief: Comment on Razmyar and Reeve (2013)

In a paper recently published in Intelligence, Razmyar and Reeve (2013) found that participants with more analytic cognitive styles reported lower religiosity on a range of measures. Importantly, however, cognitive style did not add unique effects to the prediction of religiosity once cognitive ability was taken into account; a finding that is inconsistent with previous research on the topic. However, the authors failed to discuss this inconsistency and, in fact, only cited one of the many relevant papers on the topic. The relevant paper that was cited, Shenhav, Rand, and Greene (2012), was also not accurately represented, making it difficult to draw informed conclusions about their results. In this commentary, I review the evidence that indicates a unique relation between cognitive style and religious belief. This review highlights recent developments in the field as a means to situate Razmyar and Reeve's finding in the current literature. I conclude by drawing on this research to discuss the potential reasons for Razmyar and Reeve's discrepant results.