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Post by Harry Skywalker on Dec 11, 2023 20:43:27 GMT
Are religious people really less smart, on average, than atheists?
Various studies have found that, on average, belief in God is associated with lower scores on IQ tests.
It is well established that religiosity correlates inversely with intelligence,” note Richard Daws and Adam Hampshire at Imperial College London, in a new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, which seeks to explore why.
It’s a question with some urgency – the proportion of people with a religious belief is growing: by 2050, if current trends continue, people who say they are not religious will make up only 13 per cent of the global population. Based on the low-IQ-religiosity link, it could be argued that humanity is on course to become collectively less smart. One suggestion is that perhaps religious people tend to rely more on intuition. So, rather than having impaired general intelligence, they might be comparatively poor only on tasks in which intuition and logic come into conflict – and this might explain the lower overall IQ test results. To investigate, Daws and Hampshire surveyed more than 63,000 people online, and had them complete a 30-minute set of 12 cognitive tasks that measured planning, reasoning, attention and working memory. The participants also indicated whether they were religious, agnostic or atheist. As predicted, the atheists performed better overall than the religious participants, even after controlling for demographic factors like age and education. Agnostics tended to place between atheists and believers on all tasks. In fact, strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive performance. However, while the religious respondents performed worse overall on tasks that required reasoning, there were only very small differences in working memory. Also, some of the reasoning tasks, such as an extra-hard version of the Stroop Task known as “colour-word remapping”, had been designed to create maximum conflict between an intuitive response and a logical one, and the biggest group differences emerged on these tasks, consistent with the idea that religious people rely more on their intuition. In contrast, for a complex reasoning task – “deductive reasoning” – for which there were no obviously intuitive answers, there was much less of a group difference. Daws and Hampshire concluded: “These findings provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the religiosity effect relates to conflict [between reasoning and intuition] as opposed to reasoning ability or intelligence more generally.” If, as this work suggests, religious belief predisposes people to rely more heavily on intuition in decision-making – and the stronger their belief, the more pronounced the impact – how much of a difference does this make to actual achievement in the real world? At the moment, there’s no data on this. But in theory, perhaps cognitive training could allow religious people to maintain their beliefs without over-relying on intuition when it conflicts with logic in day to day decision-making.
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Post by thorshairspray on Dec 11, 2023 20:45:26 GMT
Are you religious?
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Post by Dracula on Dec 11, 2023 20:45:35 GMT
You need more Jesus Christ in your life, Harry.
Let's hold hands and pray together.
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Post by Catman on Dec 11, 2023 20:49:42 GMT
Must smart for religious folks to read that.
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Post by poutinep on Dec 11, 2023 20:53:54 GMT
Being religious means accepting answers even though they make no sense. Being atheist means being skeptical, and believing that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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Post by lowtacks86 on Dec 11, 2023 20:54:28 GMT
I already knew this, though you do need to account for correlative factors (people that are more religious tend to be poorer and thus have less access to higher education). If you account for this (compare middle class Christians to middle class atheists) that gap would prolly close significantly, though even then I would imagine it would still be higher for atheists (i would imagine they’re more likely to be interested in science and going to college)
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Post by ofunknownorigins on Dec 11, 2023 20:56:10 GMT
The Bible says Die Hard is a Christmas movie. So is Die Hard 2.
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Post by Lux on Dec 11, 2023 20:59:53 GMT
Being religious means accepting answers even though they make no sense. Being atheist means being skeptical, and believing that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But it makes no sense for a man to wake up as a woman yet you fall for that.
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Post by averagejoe2021 on Dec 11, 2023 21:04:29 GMT
It's a bit more detailed than that. A pretty in-depth answer is in this video. As others have mentioned, it has to do with the culture (as many people in a society accept the status quo). But in mostly theistic societies... atheists will be a bit smarter because they critically thought about their philosophies and had to overcome social engineering to believe (or not) as they do. Conversely, the opposite is also true. Take China for instance where Christianity is surging faster than the few declining regions combined. Its surging amongst the most highly educated there in a society where religion is often dissuaded if not outright attacked. Of the top 10 minds in the world, 8 are theists with 6 of them being Christian. So, this is actually a very interesting and compelling topic.
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Post by OldSamVimes on Dec 11, 2023 21:09:11 GMT
I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 11, 2023 21:10:44 GMT
I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. What are your pronouns?
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Post by OldSamVimes on Dec 11, 2023 21:15:01 GMT
I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. What are your pronouns? My personal pronoun is 'narcissist'. It suits me, because I'm a person who needs my own personal pronoun!
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Post by Deleted on Dec 11, 2023 21:26:58 GMT
Well, according to a list, these unknown figures were religious:
Newton, Schrödinger, Galileo, Mendel, Planck, Copernicus, Descartes, Heisenberg, Kelvin and Faraday
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Post by poutinep on Dec 11, 2023 21:43:32 GMT
Being religious means accepting answers even though they make no sense. Being atheist means being skeptical, and believing that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But it makes no sense for a man to wake up as a woman yet you fall for that. Sex-gender distinction.
People often use the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably, but this is incorrect. Sex refers to biological physical differences, while gender is how people identify.
Basically, you're behind on your terminology.
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Post by Lux on Dec 11, 2023 21:45:51 GMT
But it makes no sense for a man to wake up as a woman yet you fall for that. Sex-gender distinction.
People often use the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably, but this is incorrect. Sex refers to biological physical differences, while gender is how people identify.
Basically, you're behind on your terminology.
Poutinep, identifying as a goldfish makes less sense but you do you.
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