The differences between religious and non-religious brains.

[Legendary Saiyan]

A brain is still a brain. Background shouldn't determine a person's intellect no matter what.

 

[Wabbit]

Religious people are not empathetic. Their empathy is overridden by religious laws. That is why they blindly do heinous acts while believing to go heaven or doing a holy act.
Mean while people who are not too much religious have to have some humanity and feel and be empathetic and then analyze to achieve social and emotional insights.

 

[Yubel]

Are you trolling? Because people sure as hell don't make decision based on just emotions atleast they shouldn't. Emotional based decision making saves time? If you always take the easiest and the most pleasent way in life and not the most beneficial and pragmatical way, you won't get progress or succeed in anything. Emotional leaders are the worst kind of leaders.


And several studies conclude that narcists and psychopaths are good leaders and while the study in the op concluded that atheists are more nearer to a narcists than a full on emotional person then that means that atheists are better leaders. Here are some studies.


"It is not the image we like to have when we think of business leaders. But troubling research indicates that in the ranks of senior management, psychopathic behavior may be more common than we think – more prevalent in fact than the amount such seriously aberrant behavior occurs in the general population."

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"Narcissists tend to be extraverted, and that is leading to the positive relationship between narcissism and leader emergence,” University of Illinois psychology professor and lead author of the study Emily. Grijalva said."

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Four professors at IMD business school, Penn State, and Erlangen-Nuremberg University have collaborated on a study that finds that chief executives who are serious narcissists perform better than more normal top bosses.

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This is not an opinion, it's a biological fact. I have a few sources, including my lesson in advertising.
Decisions are made by the orbiofrontal cortex which is right above your eyebrows. People who've suffered damage in this area have extreme difficulty to make normal everyday decisions. Because emotions aren't in play, they can be in the same place for hours assessing the pros and cons of what to eat for breakfast.

Your emotions give you a summary of an analysis that your brain made with help of signals in your body. Don't underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence.

I suggest you read the study of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

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Here is an article to summarize his findings.

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I'd also recommend you read the works of David Eagleman, another neuroscientist.
Read his book The Brain: The story of you.

 

[NarutoKage2]

Possibly. But I think its just a tendency, religious people, at the time they are being religious(praying , going to church/mosque) display more emotional and less analytical thinking, however that in no way means that they cannot possess analytical thinking, or even extraordinary analytical abilities. What the study does show, I think is that people who let their entire lives be guided solely by religion and nothing else, are idiots. No surprises there.

 

[Hawker]

This is not an opinion, it's a biological fact. I have a few sources, including my lesson in advertising.
Decisions are made by the orbiofrontal cortex which is right above your eyebrows. People who've suffered damage in this area have extreme difficulty to make normal everyday decisions. Because emotions aren't in play, they can be in the same place for hours assessing the pros and cons of what to eat for breakfast.

Your emotions give you a summary of an analysis that your brain made with help of signals in your body. Don't underestimae the importance of emotional intelligence.

I suggest you read the study of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

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Here is an article to summarize his findings.

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I'd also recommend you read the works of David Eagleman, another neuroscientist.
Read his book The Brain: The story of you.

Well you are just wrong, because it's a studied fact that psychopaths are the best leaders and they are also almost emotionless.

I glanced through that article and it didn't make any sense nor did I find any other articles or same kind of conclusions for this issue. On top of that there weren't any sources in that article.

It's also just common sense that if you make decisions based on fear, panic, hate, prejudice rather than logic, you are bound to fail in some way. I don't see this being even a debatable issue. It's pretty clear that logic beats emotion. Rationality beats empathy. Ofcourse you should find a balance between the two, but in the end the coldest motherf-ckers make the best leaders.

And I suppose I'm the only one of us two that has had any actual leading experience? I was a squadleader when I was in the army so I sure as hell can tell you that leading at the most basic level is nothing more than being pragmatical and leaving your emotions out of it.

 

[Karna]

Marik solos :Sparks:

OT: First sentence. Right at the first sentence OP shows his ignorance.

But oh well, not even a shocker anymore considering how everyone's already aware of it.

This. I wasn't even going to bother with this thread since I think it's hopeless, and I still do.

 

[Yubel]

Well you are just wrong, because it's a studied fact that psychopaths are the best leaders and they are also almost emotionless.

I glanced through that article and it didn't make any sense nor did I find any other articles or same kind of conclusions for this issue. On top of that there weren't any sources in that article.

It's also just common sense that if you make decisions based on fear, panic, hate, prejudice rather than logic, you are bound to fail in some way. I don't see this being even a debatable issue. It's pretty clear that logic beats emotion. Rationality beats empathy. Ofcourse you should find a balance between the two, but in the end the coldest motherf-ckers make the best leaders.

And I suppose I'm the only one of us two that has had any actual leading experience? I was a squadleader when I was in the army so I sure as hell can tell you that leading at the most basic level is nothing more than being pragmatical and leaving your emotions out of it.

You can be as rational as you want but the final decision always comes down to your emotion. The part of your brain responsible for decision-making doesn't understand logic.

 

[Hawker]

Possibly. But I think its just a tendency, religious people, at the time they are being religious(praying , going to church/mosque) display more emotional and less analytical thinking, however that in no way means that they cannot possess analytical thinking, or even extraordinary analytical abilities. What the study does show, I think is that people who let their entire lives be guided solely by religion and nothing else, are idiots. No surprises there.

Yeah I completely agree with you. Seeing as our prime minister is a hardcore christian (laestadian) and is also a millionaire and has master's degree in engineering it is clear to me that being religious doesn't exclude analytical skills. But this study just gives us the general outline on how these people differ.

Bolded: that's what I got from it also.

 

[Karna]

Religious people are not empathetic. Their empathy is overridden by religious laws. That is why they blindly do heinous acts while believing to go heaven or doing a holy act.
Mean while people who are not too much religious have to have some humanity and feel and be empathetic and then analyze to achieve social and emotional insights.

Generalizing both groups, it only applies to normies and even with both these descriptions the root cause isn't religion or atheism, both look for something that align with their nature and act accordingly. Like I once said I doubt all the extremists in Islam would stay so dedicated if it required them to go vegan and practice strict celibacy. The point is if they take up a violent religion etc it's because it was always in them and they found an outlet for it.
Find me a normie that wouldn't jump at a chance to be the biggest jerk they possibly can be.

Non religious people too, do you think most normal humans are 'good people'? They blindly follow society's set norms for acceptance.

And those who are actually capable of thinking for themselves wouldn't be affected whether they are religious or not.

 

[Karna]

^^Just wanted to drop that in. Hawker's thread doesn't represent the actual opinion of the people who did the study. Not saying there's anything wrong with Hawker's opinion of course. Just helping you guys get a full picture. The actual source puts the researcher's beliefs into perspective quite well

Quoting this because those who skipped this should go and read it.

 

[Hawker]

You can be as rational as you want but the final decision always comes down to your emotion. The part of your brain responsible for decision-making doesn't understand logic.

I guess what you are talking about here is somewhat subconcious. I don't understand how the brains work fully so that I could comment on this. But making decisions based on emotions and making decisions on some subconcious level connected to the "emotion" cortex seem to be two different things. It seems you are referring to the latter because you could not possibly think that emotional people make better decisions that cold hard calculating pragmaticians.

I checked wikipedia

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"One way of thinking holds that the mental process of decision-making is (or should be) rational: a formal process based on optimizing utility.[1] Rational thinking and decision-making does not leave much room for emotions.[2] In fact, emotions are often considered irrational occurrences that may distort reasoning. ( Barnes, A. and P. Thagard. 1996. Emotional decisions. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society pp. 426–429.)

But okay then this is what said about emotions:

However, there are presently both theories and research focusing on the important role of emotions in decision-making. Loewenstein and Lerner divide emotions during decision-making into two types: those anticipating future emotions and those immediately experienced while deliberating and deciding. Damasio formulated the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH), that proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide (or bias) behavior, particularly decision-making. Pfister and Böhm believe that "the issue of rationality should be based on the validity of emotional evaluations rather than on formal coherence.”


^This sates that emotions only serve to bias behaviour in decision making.


Much research has been conducted on the various impacts of emotion on decision-making. Studies indicate the complexity and breadth of those impacts. Listed below are some examples of their results.

- Decision-makers who were made to consider safety concerns that induced negative emotions when deciding which car to purchase, were more likely to “choose not to choose,” or to stick with the status quo.[4]

- Study participants who experienced “frustrated anger” were more likely to choose a high risk, high reward option in a lottery – a choice the authors categorize as “self-defeating."[5]
"Fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements."[6]

- Study participants who had been induced to feel sad were likely to set a lower selling price for an item they were asked to sell; the researchers suggest that selling the item would bring about a change in the participants’ circumstances and thus perhaps a positive change in mood.[7]

- Participants with “normal emotion processing” were engaged in a card-drawing task. When drawing from “dangerous decks" and consequently experiencing losses and the associated negative emotions, they subsequently made safer and more lucrative choices. Participants with brain damage that had left them unable to experience such emotional responses, did not change their behavior in this way.[8]


^ Most of those studies showed a clear correlation with certain feelings and negative outcomes. I don't see how anyone could say that emotional leader is better. Being emotional means you are prone to all kinds of emotions and those studies show that for example anger, sadness, frustration, fear are bad for decision making.

 

[Gerkak]

when humans commit crimes and barbaric acts they say evolution programmed man to do so as if man was meant to be a vicious animal. Dawking himself is such a person, he said he saw no problem with pedophilia as long as both parties accepted, he also said there was no problem with a 16 year old girl drowning her new born baby during her prom night in a toilet.

Why should the words of such a vile human being be considered. We might as well bring back the study that says that Ashkanazi jews are the most intelligent. Every human can be terrible without empathy,morals etc regardless of what their religion, race, gender etc.

If emotion is removed then people would be programmable there would be no resistance. A child without emotions can be molded as easily if not more so than one with emotions. The problem is that these scientists are evolutionists which is in itself is a religion.

 

[Marin]

Another piece of nonsense, when humans commit crimes and barbaric acts they say evolution programmed man to do so as if man was meant to be a vicious animal. Dawking himself is such a person, he said he saw no problem with pedophilia as long as both parties accepted, he also said there was no problem with a 16 year old girl drowning her new born baby during her prom night in a toilet.

Why should the words of such a vile human being be considered. We might as well bring back the study that says that Ashkanazi jews are the most intelligent. Every human can be terrible without empathy,morals etc regardless of what their religion, race, gender etc.

Words to deaf ears my friend.

Inb4 "Dawkins is smarter than me and u combined"

 

[Gerkak]

Words to deaf ears my friend.

Inb4 "Dawkins is smarter than me and u combined"

Let them be blind, deaf and dumb. Gerkak is not a messiah who came to save the world, if the majority want to deceive themselves then by all means. Dawking can be as smart as the rest of the human population combined that won't stop him from being wrong.

Dawkins is smarter than me and u combined-

Maybe you but not me. Do you worship Dawkins now? Do you plan on starting a religion centered around him? You treat him with such reverence, idol worship.

 

[Yubel]

Well you are just wrong, because it's a studied fact that psychopaths are the best leaders and they are also almost emotionless.

I glanced through that article and it didn't make any sense nor did I find any other articles or same kind of conclusions for this issue. On top of that there weren't any sources in that article.

It's also just common sense that if you make decisions based on fear, panic, hate, prejudice rather than logic, you are bound to fail in some way. I don't see this being even a debatable issue. It's pretty clear that logic beats emotion. Rationality beats empathy. Ofcourse you should find a balance between the two, but in the end the coldest motherf-ckers make the best leaders.

And I suppose I'm the only one of us two that has had any actual leading experience? I was a squadleader when I was in the army so I sure as hell can tell you that leading at the most basic level is nothing more than being pragmatical and leaving your emotions out of it.

You talk about the article not making sense. It makes perfect sense to me.
You say there are no sources to the article. Maybe not but the article is based on the study of Antonio Damasio who's abstract I gave in the other link. Of course you completely ignored that.

There weren't any sources in your third link.
I haven't checked your second link.

However, your first link is not a fact. Correlation doesn't mean causation. Infact here is what the abstract says that contradict the whole article praising narcissists and psychopaths.

"Psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma/presentation style(crativity, good strategic-thinking and communication skills), but was negatively associated with ratings of responsibility/performance( being a team player, management skills and overall accomplishments)."

So you think someone who lacks responsibility, is unable to manage his company/organization and falls short of overall accomplishment is fit to lead others? If so you're delusional, who cares about a leader who can't take care of his employees and can't achieve goals? I don't care how charismatic you are if you can't take responsibility, you're not a leader. And if you can't deliver results you're shit.

 

[Pumpkin Ninja]

With what you don't agree? That narcissists are generally better leaders? It's a studied fact lmao. I wasn't talking about causation. No one cares if you don't agree with facts.

"It is not the image we like to have when we think of business leaders. But troubling research indicates that in the ranks of senior management, psychopathic behavior may be more common than we think – more prevalent in fact than the amount such seriously aberrant behavior occurs in the general population."

You must be registered for see links

"Narcissists tend to be extraverted, and that is leading to the positive relationship between narcissism and leader emergence,” University of Illinois psychology professor and lead author of the study Emily. Grijalva said."

You must be registered for see links

Four professors at IMD business school, Penn State, and Erlangen-Nuremberg University have collaborated on a study that finds that chief executives who are serious narcissists perform better than more normal top bosses.

You must be registered for see links

Religion had nothing to do with any of the inventions you implied there. Boom.

90% of America's National Academy of Science's are non religious. Get rekt.

Also: Religious people are less intelligent than atheists, according to analysis of scores of scientific studies stretching back over decades. Atheists 'have higher IQs': Their intelligence 'makes them more likely to dismiss religion as irrational and unscientific

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^that destroys your whole argument.

Bolded: lol getting mad I see. You know quite well that alot of people take me seriously so stop the act.


You also don't realise that we are speaking generally here and not about causation. So yes generally speaking a religious person is less intelligent as atheist.



Yeah could lol.

It's not a flaw. Take a look what I posted above.

You aren't speaking generally when you straight up just aaid you were smarter than Osmon for being an atheist. "Boom get Rekt. Sit down."

 

[Yubel]

I just debunked your forbes links Hawker, what do you have to say about narcissists being better leaders?

 

[Hawker]

?? I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here.

I know why you didn't put it in the OP..it had nothing to do with your take on the study. What I posted was their interpretation you just had a different one. Nothing wrong with that. As far as the next part, again I'm not really sure what exactly you're trying to say or how it fits into the point you were trying to make.

I said it because so that no one wouldn't get the picture that "90% of scientists are religious". And this beng NB that could have been possible.

Also you do know the the organization you mentioned represents a very small portion of scientists in the US correct? The American Association for the Advancement of Science is a much larger scientific organization (I think the largest) and cited about half of their members as believing either in a God or some higher form of power.

Actually I didn't know that. Thanks for the info, and yeah I just checked that study myself, from 2009, and what you say is correct. But then again it's U.S so I'm not surprised, no offence.

Indoctrination works both ways. That's why so many people tend to think "atheism" and "science" fit hand and glove when in truth they don't anymore than "science" and "religion". A good atheist believes there is no God or higher being without question, similar to a person of religion believing in the opposite. A good scientist, however, will not enter into one extreme over the other, because their belief system is to question, until proven. Not to question until they feel they have enough evidence to make their point. But to test theories over and over until they get a definitive answer. To accept any idea as fact without definitive proof is contradictory to scientific process.

Underlined: agree.

Bolded: I don't agree with this if you are implying atheist do that. Atheism is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. It just states that to which there isn't any proof of is not real. They do not say it couldn't be real, but based on the facts that we right now have at our disposal, it isn't real. It's the same with scientific process, get the proof and then claim something. So in a sense it is just the same as scientific process. But atheism is just the absence of belief and going by the facts. I'm not sure if I explained this correctly as english isn't my native language, but yeah.

You aren't speaking generally when you straight up just aaid you were smarter than Osmon for being an atheist. "Boom get Rekt. Sit down."

No I said atheist is generally speaking smarter than a muslim and it's a studied fact.

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You just got assigned to your seat.

I just debunked your forbes links Hawker, what do you have to say about narcissists being better leaders?

Lol I linked you two forbes links and one more and in the next reply I also linked you ton of studies from wikipedia which conclude that emotions are bad for decicion making. Boom. It's just clear as a day.

 

[Yubel]

I said it because so that no one wouldn't get the picture that "90% of scientists are religious". And this beng NB that could have been possible.


Actually I didn't know that. Thanks for the info, and yeah I just checked that study myself, from 2009, and what you say is correct. But then again it's U.S so I'm not surprised, no offence.




Underlined: agree.

Bolded: I don't agree with this if you are implying atheist do that. Atheism is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. It just states that to which there isn't any proof of is not real. They do not say it couldn't be real, but based on the facts that we right now have at our disposal, it isn't real. It's the same with scientific process, get the proof and then claim something. So in a sense it is just the same as scientific process. But atheism is just the absence of belief and going by the facts. I'm not sure if I explained this correctly as english isn't my native language, but yeah.



No I said atheist is generally speaking smarter than a muslim and it's a studied fact.

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You just got assigned to your seat.



Lol I linked you two forbes links and one more and in the next reply I also linked you ton of studies from wikipedia which conclude that emotions are bad for decicion making. Boom. It's just clear as a day.

I'll read your third link from inc and then I'll get back to you. I will also address your post on emotion later. However, since your forbes link contradicts itself. I doubt I'll suddently find evidence of narcissism/psychopathy being a good leadership quality.

 

[Gerkak]

Its funny because its true. xd

oh shit Gerkak!! oh shit ohh shitttt!!!!!!!!!!! it got real!!!!!!!!!

The only thing the guy can say is Dawkin and like minded people are intelligent. Intelligent people can be wrong, have been for years and will continue to be. In Science what is considered is the hypothesis being presented, the credentials of the person(s) who presented it, their social standing, fame are irrelevant. Many scientists today worship Einstein, but he was no more than a clerk when he first wrote his paper on relativity, if he was judged on his job alone the theory would have never been published.

Hawker's worship of these men is unfortunately prevalent among many young men who think they posses vast knowledge.