Many religious people deny any conflict between religion and science, but nevertheless report less trust in science than non-religious people. We address this puzzle using insights from goal systems theory. Goal systems theory suggests that, when people have more means of achieving a goal, they perceive each individual means as less instrumental. We translate this "instrumentality hypothesis" to differences in how religious and non-religious people perceive science and religion. Religious people-who use both science and religion as means to gain knowledge-may perceive both as moderately instrumental, and as less instrumental than non-religious people view science. We support the instrumentality hypothesis in studies where participants evaluate the capacity of science and religion to explain extraordinary phenomena (Study 1), fill gaps in knowledge (Study 2), answer life's big questions (Study 3), and to help avoid COVID-19 infection (Study 4). We also find that non-religious people overperceive religious people's trust in religion and underperceive religious people's trust in science as sources of knowledge (Study 5). Non-religious people think that religion deters trust in science at the expense of high trust in religion, but instead, the typical religious person avoids extreme epistemic reliance on any single source of knowledge.

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning.

People are known to be susceptible to psychological essentialism when reasoning about organ transplantation, believing that the mental characteristics of the donor will transfer to the recipient. Because psychological essentialism is exacerbated in negative social contexts (i.e., moral contagion bias), the effect may be especially apparent when people consider the impact of receiving organs from donors who died by stigmatized causes, such as suicide and homicide. In a forced-choice paradigm, participants overwhelmingly ranked a suicide victim as their least preferred donor, with accident victims being the most preferred donors and homicide victims the most common second choice. In a follow-up study, we investigated the psychological mechanisms underlying this unease about suicide donors. Compared to those who imagined receiving a heart from homicide or accident victims, participants who imagined a suicide donor expressed greater unease about the source of their transplant. The effect could not be explained by participants' rumination about the source of the transplant, or by the explicitly perceived stigma of suicide, but did depend on their essentialist beliefs. Those who believed that negative or neutral (but not positive) traits of the donor could transfer to them were more hesitant about receiving a heart from a suicide relative to other donors. These data suggest that the bias against suicide organ donors is moderated by socially relevant essentialist beliefs.