Religion may provide a “buffer” allowing the devout to feel less anxiety when they make mistakes, compared with non-believers, according to new scientific research.
Researchers at the University of Toronto measured “error-related negativity” — people’s defensive response to errors — and compared it to religious belief. Their findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.
In the experiments, participants had electrodes measuring their brain activity as they performed cognitive tests. One test of 40 students involved making a grammatically-correct sentence out of jumbled words; some of the sentences contained words with religious connotations, like “sacred” or “divine.”