Religious belief, religious dialectical thinking, and the relation between thinking style and religious belief

: A cross-cultural study of British, French, and Japanese

Abstract

In general, a negative association has been reported between an analytical cognitive style and religiosity. On the other hand, it is plausible that Easterners, known as dialectical thinkers, accept religiosity and its religious skepticism dialectically. British, French and Japanese people participated in the present web survey. They were given questionnaires on religiosity (the subscales were pro-religiosity, divine protection, and retribution), anti-religiosity, wisdom judgement on religious dialectic thinking, and thinking style (the subscales were preference for intuitive thinking (PIT), preference for effortful thinking (PET), actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and close-minded thinking (CMT)). An individual who agrees or disagrees with both religiosity and anti-religiosity is considered a religious dialectical thinker. We found that (1) the retribution score of the Japanese was higher than those of British and French, (2) the Japanese were more religious dialectical thinkers than British and French, (3) in general, the religious belief of the British and French was suppressed by AOT, whereas the religious belief of the Japanese was enhanced by PIT. We conclude that the suppression of religious belief by the analytic cognitive style is characteristic to Westerners, and that Japanese are more religious dialectical thinkers than Westerners.