![]() ![]() ![]() However, while the religious respondents performed worse overall on tasks that required reasoning, there were only very small differences in working memory.Īlso, 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 fact, strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive performance. Agnostics tended to place between atheists and believers on all tasks. The participants also indicated whether they were religious, agnostic or atheist.Īs predicted, the atheists performed better overall than the religious participants, even after controlling for demographic factors like age and education. 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. 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. One suggestion is that perhaps religious people tend to rely more on intuition. Based on the low-IQ-religiosity link, it could be argued that humanity is on course to become collectively less smart. 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. “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. But various studies have found that, on average, belief in God is associated with lower scores on IQ tests. Of course, there are examples of extremely intelligent individuals with strong religious convictions. ![]()
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