AUTHOR=Colzato Lorenza S., Hommel Bernhard , Van Den Wildenberg Wery , Hsieh Shulan 

TITLE=Buddha as an eye opener: A link between prosocial attitude and attentional control

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 1 - 2010

YEAR=2010

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00156

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00156

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Increasing evidence suggests that religious practice induces systematic biases in attentional control. We used Navon’s global-local task to compare attentional bias in Taiwanese Buddhists and Taiwanese atheists; two groups brought up in the same country and culture and matched with respect to race, intelligence, sex, and age. Given the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for the physical and social environment, we expected a more global bias in Buddhist than in Atheist participants. In line with these expectations, Buddhists showed a larger global-precedence effect and increased interference from global distracters when processing local information. This pattern reinforces the idea that people's attentional processing style reflects biases rewarded by their religious beliefs.