https://theconversation.com/religion-may-alter-your-psychology-even-if-youre-a-non-believer-83506
“Explicit and implicit attitudes
Explicit attitudes are those people can call to mind consciously and can report when asked: for example “carrots are good for me” or “God does not exist”.
By contrast, people have little or no awareness of their implicit attitudes — the learned associations between ideas in their minds, such as how easily the concept “carrot” brings to mind another concept like “bland,” or how easily the word “God” brings to mind “existence”.
As these examples illustrate, implicit and explicit attitudes can clash. It’s possible for a person to say they “love carrots” while unconsciously bringing negative associations to mind about them. Or, to say “God does not exist” while unconsciously bringing to mind ideas of God’s existence.
In this way, it makes sense for nonbelievers to get nervous at the thought of daring God to do harm.
How attitudes shape health
The idea that mismatches between explicit and implicit attitudes can create conflict is consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance.
Studies exploring this psychological phenomenon found that conflict between your behaviour (for example, meeting parental expectations of being a submissive daughter) and your own perception of who you are (for example, being an independent woman) was associated with relatively high scores on measures of neuroticism and depression, and low scores on measures of self-esteem, compared to people whose behaviours and self-perceptions better align.
Likewise, people whose implicit and explicit attitudes about their self-esteem are misaligned (those who report high self-esteem, but hold negative unconscious associations about the self, or vice versa) suffer negative outcomes. They are more likely to become defensive in response to negative feedback, to suppress their anger and to take days off of work for health reasons.
Might cognitive dissonance also be at play in the context of religion?
Religion and health
Cognitive dissonance, and the degree of alignment of implicit and explicit beliefs might help us understand relationships between religion and health. Indeed, positive outcomes of religious belief could help explain why implicit beliefs persist in nonbelievers.
A study of over 400 white American men showed that those who attended church had lower blood pressure, and a separate study found having a religious affiliation is associated with a greater sense of well-being. Tweets posted by Christians have been interpreted to reflect greater happiness and social connectivity than those from atheists, and believers in God are reported to be less anxious about their eventual death, and more certain about the meaning of their existence.
But things aren’t so simple when religious belief is less robust. People with moderate religious beliefs report lower well-being than those with very strong or very weak beliefs. Many factors will be at work here, but one to consider is that moderate believers are more likely to hold conflicting implicit and explicit beliefs.
How my heart speaks 