"The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations"

[Jeremiahcp]

When I go back and look over the study, they seem to do a good job of calling it a correlation, and not causation. Unless I am overlooking a part, it is 30 pages long.

 

[yokomodoful]

source

Interesting that the top of the religiosity arc is at an IQ of about 72. An IQ Rating of 70-79 indicates borderline deficiency


.[/COLOR
What is also interesting is the highest IQ listed is 110. Did they exclude slightly higher than average intelligence or people with higher IQs in the study?

INDENT]​

​

 

[osgart]

certainly there is a lot of fallacious religions, but that doesn't diminish religious practice or thought. Science has done much to end fallacy, but also has opened the window to new religious explorations.
Something Buddhism welcomes as it amends itself. I can't help but see the rise of new more modern religions because religion fills a void in many people's lives. There is actually benefits to religion for many people. Religion isn't always a cult.

 

[osgart]

I can't think of a higher goal in life than to become a better human being. I see religion making moral progress, but only after being forced to it by public opinion. For example, the abolition of slavery and the current world-wide movement for women's rights -- the sacred texts of Western religion don't support either.

If a man without a religion examines his conscience and wants to change his attitude on the women's issue, it's a simple thing to do. But if he's a faithful Jew, a Christian or a Muslim, and he wants approval from his rabbi, priest, minister or imam, he might not live long enough to get it.

those are the three most attacked religions and they deserve every ounce of criticism for being ancient cults with very little truth in them.

 

[Milton Platt]

The topic of the article is correlation. They entertain some discussion as to why, but the actual meta-analysis was to assets correlation. It is possible to study correlation without making official inferences about causation.

I agree. That comment was meant more for the readers who confuse the two. It is a very interesting phenomenon. I hope more study is done.

 

[LukeS]

IQ is defined by, is often exercised and functions within, and is socially selected and socially approved, and financially reinforced all within a context of secular capitalist materialist business and university culture.


Prays.....

....could this relate more to EQ?

"Results show an overlap between prayer and speaking to a loved one in brain areas associated with theory of mind, suggesting that the brain treats both as an interpersonal relationship. These brain areas are also associated with the default mode network, where the mind evaluates past and possible future experiences of the self. It is suggested that the high personal significance that participants attach to prayer experiences is due in part to their taking place in core areas of self-understanding."
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2153599X.2013.768288?src=recsys&journalCode=rrbb20

"Researchers collected detailed assessments of the feelings of participants, who, almost universally, reported experiencing the kinds of feelings typical of an intense worship service. They described feelings of peace and physical sensations of warmth. Many were in tears by the end of the scan. In one experiment, participants pushed a button when they felt a peak spiritual feeling while watching church-produced stimuli." This Is Your Brain on God | UNews

 

[viole]

I thought this study would make an interesting conversation piece. It is long, but I think worth reading, so if you see something in the study you disagree with, quote it and share why, or feel free to do the same on something you agree with. It may be hard but please keep the discussion about the study itself.

This is the article itself: SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

Here is the source site: SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

To be honest, I am skeptical. I am skeptical because that would entail that my younger past self was less intelligent than my current older self, at least with a certain level of confidence. Lol.

But I am also skeptical because it is difficult to measure intelligence. The Germans say: Wenn Du misst, Du misst mist. That means: when you measure, you measure crap. And when it comes to measure intelligence, that saying might apply.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Skwim]

Why so few data points for IQ over 100? This makes the graph very suspect.

I post source links for two reasons. One, because acknowledging sources is required (I would do it even if it wasn't). Two, it enables others to read the actual material if they wish. Accessing the link, one will find the following.

The relationship of religiosity with education and intelligence was investigated with data from the World Values Survey covering a total of 345,743 respondents in 96 countries. The individual-level relationship of education with religious belief was slightly but significantly negative in the majority of countries, although its relationship with religious attendance was substantially less negative. At the country level, religious belief has independent negative relationships with intelligence and a history of communist rule, but not with educational exposure and log-transformed GDP. The results suggest that a weak negative relationship of religiosity with education is culturally amplified into far larger differences at the country level, and that the effect of education is mediated by cognitive skills. The results suggest that secularization during the 20th century has been driven by cognitive rather than economic development.

.
​

 

[Polymath257]

I post source links for two reasons. One, because acknowledging sources is required (I would do it even if it wasn't). Two, it enables others to read the actual material if they wish. Accessing the link, one will find the following.

The relationship of religiosity with education and intelligence was investigated with data from the World Values Survey covering a total of 345,743 respondents in 96 countries. The individual-level relationship of education with religious belief was slightly but significantly negative in the majority of countries, although its relationship with religious attendance was substantially less negative. At the country level, religious belief has independent negative relationships with intelligence and a history of communist rule, but not with educational exposure and log-transformed GDP. The results suggest that a weak negative relationship of religiosity with education is culturally amplified into far larger differences at the country level, and that the effect of education is mediated by cognitive skills. The results suggest that secularization during the 20th century has been driven by cognitive rather than economic development.

.
​

And again, the mean IQ is supposed to be 100. The graph given has a large collection of IQs between 70 and 100 and almost none above 110. This alone shows it to be a biased sample.

Now, we can ask what the origin of that bias is. I suspect, but cannot prove, a biased use of IQ tests.

 

[Skwim]

And again, the mean IQ is supposed to be 100. The graph given has a large collection of IQs between 70 and 100 and almost none above 110. This alone shows it to be a biased sample.

Now, we can ask what the origin of that bias is. I suspect, but cannot prove, a biased use of IQ tests.

From what I remember of my courses in psychology that dealt with IQ distribution, I think you have a very good point here.

.

 

[Searching1981]

I thought this study would make an interesting conversation piece. It is long, but I think worth reading, so if you see something in the study you disagree with, quote it and share why, or feel free to do the same on something you agree with. It may be hard but please keep the discussion about the study itself.

This is the article itself: SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

Here is the source site: SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

Correlation, which is all that is suggested by r mean value is not causation in either direction. A Meta-Analysis does not consider methodology of previous analysis, all it is a survey of research. The most important part of any paper is not editorial conclusion but rather methodology.

 

[Jeremiahcp]

Correlation, which is all that is suggested by r mean value is not causation in either direction. A Meta-Analysis does not consider methodology of previous analysis, all it is a survey of research. The most important part of any paper is not editorial conclusion but rather methodology.

You may want to try actually reading the thread.

 

[Nous]

I thought this study would make an interesting conversation piece. It is long, but I think worth reading, so if you see something in the study you disagree with, quote it and share why, or feel free to do the same on something you agree with. It may be hard but please keep the discussion about the study itself.

This is the article itself: SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

Here is the source site: SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

There's plenty to critique about this meta-analysis and the studies used in it. The methodologies raise a number of questions that unfortunately Zuckerman et al. do not address. One of the most glaring is the limited applicability, with the meta-analysis coding only for Christian and Jewish religions. The study provides no reason whatsoever to assume that inclusion of Muslims, Buddhists, Vedantists, etc., would have yielded similar results.

Zuckerman et al. leave one to wonder what sort of beliefs were assessed in the various studies, noting only that “the religiosity measures included belief scales that assessed various themes related to religiosity (e.g., belief in God and/or the importance of church). In addition, we included studies that measured frequency of religious behaviors (e.g., church attendance, prayer), participation in religious organizations, and membership in denominations.” One can easily see how little relevance “religiosity” would have to religious beliefs outside of Christian and Jewish sects.

The 63 studies employed an astounding number of different methods of assessing IQ, for which Zuckerman et al. express little concern about correlation of scores. The authors acknowledge the that correlation between GPA and “Intelligence” is at best .25-.40, but refer to this as “moderate”. It isn't “moderate”. Many of the tests used in the studies are not any sort of standard intelligence test, and do not purport to measure IQ. Zuckerman et al. do not address this decisive issue. Even for standard tests, “[d]espite reported evidence of strong concurrent correlations among IQ tests (concurrent validity), different IQ tests often produce different IQs for the same individual.”

The issue of sex and IQ test scores, especially test scores from the 20th century, is critical, given that women have historically scored lower than men on such tests (which has changed with revisions of the tests). Additionally, women also outnumber men in church membership and attendance in the US, a fact the authors do not mention. But they do inform us that in “the 34 studies in which it could be determined, percentage of males was positively correlated with unweighted effect sizes, r(32) = .50, p < .01. This correlation indicates that the negative intelligence–religiosity relation was less negative in studies with more males. This relation held in terms of magnitude for the precollege and college groups, r(6) = .48, ns, and r(12) = .51, p = .06, but was weaker at the non-college level, r(10) = .19, ns. When analyzed as a fixed effects regression, the relation between percentage of males and effect size was also markedly positive, p < .001.” Eventually the authors advise that “the issue of gender as a moderator of the intelligence–religiosity relation remains a topic for future research.” The authors do not attempt to discover to what degree sex differences in IQ test scores and women's greater church membership and attendance account for the findings of the meta-analysis.

The authors were even more reluctant to address the issue of race. IQ test scores consistently follow a racial/ethnic pattern: African Americans < Latinos < whites < Asians. The authors coded the studies according to 4 seemingly uninformative categories, and merely tell us that “for religion and race, the resulting distributions were too skewed to allow meaningful analysis.” Apparently this means that race is a significant factor in accounting for the findings of the meta-analysis. The authors should not have shied away from the effect of race on their findings.

It seems it should be easy to discover a correlation between religious beliefs and intelligence, if there exists such a correlation, without mixing in extraneous issues of church attendance and so forth.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

But I am also skeptical because it is difficult to measure intelligence. The Germans say: Wenn Du misst, Du misst mist. That means: when you measure, you measure crap. And when it comes to measure intelligence, that saying might apply.

There's an American expression - that has made its way into Canada as well - that goes "if you can measure it, you can manage it."

I wonder if the difference in quotes reflects an important difference between prevailing attitudes in the two countries.