Buddha as an eye opener: a link between prosocial attitude and attentional control

• ¹ Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
• ² Amsterdam Center for the Study of Adaptive Control in Brain and Behaviour (Acacia) Psychology Department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• ³ Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan City, Taiwan
• ⁴ Department of Psychology and Institute of Allied Health Sciences, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan City, Taiwan

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 Zen 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 practices.