Blink If You’re a Calvinist

Apparently, we Calvinists have a rather blinkered worldview:

The attentional blink is another of those weird and wonderful cognitive blind spots with which the human race is afflicted. Flash up two images in close succession, and we find it really difficult to even notice the second, let alone figure out what it is. That’s basically because our brains are still engaged in processing the first one.

In another recent study by Lorenzo Colzato . . . atheists and Dutch Christian Calvinists have had their attentional blinks assessed.

Lorenzo found that the atheists she tested had a shorter attentional blink than the Calvinists. In fact, as the figure shows, there actually seems to be a fairly direct relationship between how often the people in her study prayed, and the length of their attentional blink.

She thinks that this is related to her earlier finding (that Calvinists are ‘detail’ people rather than ‘big picture’ people). Calvinists are trained from birth to focus on a narrower, rather than a bigger context, and Lorenzo thinks that this have widespread effects on their style of information processing – when compared to individuals who are raised with a broader, more complex worldview (including religious people).

(Via: Big Questions Online)