Are religious people really less smart, on average, than atheists? [Spirituality & Religion]
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. Its said that atheists surpass religious individuals in terms of reasoning but not working-memory performance. The religiosity effect is robust across🤔
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I've seen studies to that effect. However I think that the correlation between IQ and religious beliefs may have to do with personality and circumstance.
@HoraceGreenley People with higher IQ typically earn more money and have more personal resources. As a result they don't need assistance from governments, charities or religious groups.
@HoraceGreenley Understand. Data I have to work with was only based on 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. Apparently 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, go figure....pffff
SW-User
Bingo. I think people can be inquisitive and seek to learn whether religious or not, and I also agree that circumstances (especially resources) have an impact regardless of their beliefs. @HoraceGreenley
@HoraceGreenley I tend to agree. The less developed cultures tend to lean more heavily on their religion as an explanation and a set of societal norms. Thats not a function of intelligence. Just their stage of development. In my view religious belief is separated completely from what we call IQ. On the other hand I know some senior academics, who while highly intelligent, manage to remain amazingly ignorant of any number of things outside their area of expertise. So IQ is not the key to universal cleverness. We need another measure.
@suchaslife Binet never meant for his test to measure intelligence. It was to identify kids that needed help in school. He just gave it a name that caused confusion.
