As implied earlier in the introduction, previous research indicates that certain forms of religiosity are associated with a preference for certainty and avoidance of uncertainty (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). In particular, fundamentalism is associated with the need for cognitive closure (Brandt & Reyna, 2010; Saroglou, 2002), which mediates the relationship between fundamentalism and prejudice towards value-violating outgroups, with close-mindedness and preference for order and predictability accounting for the effect (Brandt & Reyna, 2010). A need for cognitive closure represents the desire for predictability and rigidity instead of openness, and is correlated with conservative, conforming values (Calogero, Bardi, & Sutton, 2009; Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). Recently, a number of studies have found an inverse relationship between analytic thinking and religious disbelief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013). These studies describe analytic thinking as an underminer of religious beliefs which may either suppress default tendencies to form religious beliefs or inhibit culturally acquired concepts. Finally, it has been argued that religious beliefs arise from deficits in perceptual tracking of ecological variation (e.g. Foster & Kokko, 2009; Guthrie, 1993). Collectively, these findings predict that fundamentalism may be related to reduced cognitive flexibility and trait openness, and that these cognitive strategies critically rely on processing in the PFC.
The present findings contribute a piece to what is becoming an increasingly complex depiction of religious beliefs that will occupy investigators for many decades because of its historically key contribution to human social behavior. In summary, we found that adherence to fundamentalist religious doctrine is partly mediated by diminished flexible conceptual thinking and reduced openness and that the key cortical region supporting the representation of diverse religious belief as well as flexible conceptual thinking is the dlPFC.
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