Critical Thinking Suppressed, More Empathy Shown in Brains of People who Believe in God

Well, it's hardly surprising now, is it... (at least on the critical thinking side). The International Business Times reports the following (this has done the rounds over the last month):

The opposition between religious beliefs and scientific evidence can be explained by difference in brain structures and cognitive activity. Scientists have found critical thinking is suppressed in the brains of people who believe in the supernatural.

Published in PLOS One, their study examines how the parts of the brain responsible for empathy and analytical reasoning are linked to faith and spiritual thinking. It suggests religious beliefs and scientific thinking clash because different brain areas are involved in both cognitive processes. People who believe in the supernatural appear to suppress areas associated with critical thinking....

For the latest study, the scientists conducted a series of eight experiments, involving between 159 and 527 adults. Their purpose was to compare belief in God with measures of analytic thinking and moral concern.

In each experiment, the researchers found that both spiritual belief and empathic concern were positively associated with frequent religious practice. The more a person was religious, the more he or she is likely to suppress the analytical network in the brain, and to show empathy.

Scientists say that when an individual is conflicted between a scientific or religious view of the world, his brain structures will determine how he will address this opposition between beliefs and science.

There certainly seems a lot to unpick there. The abstract states:

Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with some aspects of social-emotional cognition. This leaves open two questions. First, is belief linked to social and emotional cognition in general, or a specific dimension in particular? Second, does the negative relationship between belief and analytic thinking still hold after relationships with social and emotional cognition are taken into account? We report eight hypothesis-driven studies which examine these questions. These studies are guided by a theoretical model which focuses on the distinct social and emotional processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders (mentalizing) and psychopathy (moral concern). To our knowledge no other study has investigated both of these dimensions of social and emotion cognition alongside analytic thinking. We find that religious belief is robustly positively associated with moral concern (4 measures), and that at least part of the negative association between belief and analytic thinking (2 measures) can be explained by a negative correlation between moral concern and analytic thinking. Using nine different measures of mentalizing, we found no evidence of a relationship between mentalizing and religious or spiritual belief. These findings challenge the theoretical view that religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to the perception of agency, and suggest that gender differences in religious belief can be explained by differences in moral concern. These findings are consistent with the opposing domains hypothesis, according to which brain areas associated with moral concern and analytic thinking are in tension.

So the nonreligious appear to have less moral concern, but are better critical thinkers. We are more likely, robustly so apparently, to be psychopaths. In other words, there is some sort of mutual exlusivity between analytical thinking and moral concern.