By STUART RITCHIE - TIME OUT OF MIND
Added: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:04:24 UTC

Mods' note:

Stuart Ritchie is a PhD student in the Psychology Dept of the University of Edinburgh. He and his colleagues have just had a study published in the journal Intelligence concerning the relationship between religious fundamentalism, spirituality, and IQ.

The article can be found here.

The full PDF download is here.

We are reproducing below Stuart's summary of the research.

Why are some people religious? Putting aside arguments over whether the claims of particular religions have factual validity or not (up-front declaration: I’m an atheist), the existence of wildly varying degrees of religious sensibility in every society studied is quite perplexing for psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists. Some colleagues and I have just had a paper published (PDF here) which attempts to provide a piece of this puzzle, focusing on the relationship between religious beliefs and general intelligence, or IQ.

Could your score on tests like this predict how religious you are? (Yes!)

For some time, psychologists and neuroscientists have made attempts to explain religion, ranging from the ill-fated ‘God Helmet‘ (the idea that religious experiences might be a form of temporal lobe epilepsy) to ideas about how religions bind us into communities, to approaches involving hypothesised psychological mechanisms such as the hyperactive agent-detection device (HADD; an evolutionarily advantageous ability which would see us ascribing ‘human-like agency [to the] environment that might not actually exist’ (p. 31), and misinterpreting, say, the rising of the sun as an intentional act which must therefore have some kind of supernatural actor). None of these theories are necessarily mutually exclusive – it’s clear a future psychological theory of religion will need to explain evidence from a wide variety of perspectives.

Of course, to many people, any attempt to scientifically explain their deeply-held beliefs will be highly offensive, but probably the most controversial research in this area has involved IQ. A wide range of recent studies have looked at connections between cognitive ability and religiosity. To take just three examples: this study found that atheism rates in 137 countries correlated highly (r = .60) with the country’s average IQ, while this one showed in a sample of students that high-IQ individuals are more likely to question religious beliefs, and this one found that atheist adolescents had higher IQs than their moderately religious peers, who in turn were higher in IQ than religious fundamentalists. There are plenty of other studies, too.

Read on

TAGGED: PSYCHOLOGY, RELIGION