
Religious people understand the world less, study suggests - amexrap
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/religious-people-understand-world-less-study-shows-a7378896.html
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amexrap
Summary: "Although supernatural beliefs often paint a peculiar picture about
the physical world, the possibility that the beliefs might be based on
inadequate understanding of the non-social world has not received research
attention. In this study (N = 258), we therefore examined how physical-world
skills and knowledge predict religious and paranormal beliefs. The results
showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were
included, namely, with low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor
mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and
physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena,
intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning
mentality to non-mental phenomena. Regression analyses indicated that the
strongest predictors of the beliefs were overall physical capability (a factor
representing most physical skills, interests, and knowledge) and intuitive
thinking style."
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.3248/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.3248/full)

Paywalled

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jonnys1
I think you could have suspected that to say the least :) It's very hard to be
as realistic as possible. People have all kind of delusions (not only
religion). We have a world we create in our head and live according to laws of
that world and not of reality.

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cup
The thing that annoys me most about science communication and science in
general is when people abuse it to make lazy claims.

Here is the methodology:

"Two hundred fifty eight Finnish participants (63.6% women) took part in the
online study. Their mean age was 31.81 years (SD = 9.89, range 18–65). Of the
participants, 38.1% were working, 44.4% were students, and 17.5% were employed
in activities other than those mentioned earlier; 1.2% had grammar school
education, 44.2% had vocational or upper secondary school education, and 54.5%
had polytechnic or university education. Religious affiliations were none
(61%), Christian (37%), or other (2%)."

Tell me if you think you can make the claim that "religious people understand
the world less" from that. The title should be 'Christian Finns understand the
world less compared to non-christian Finns" and even that is being lazy.

If I did a behavioural study with male and female rats and mice of various
ages I would be laughed out of the room. So why so much leeway with these
studies when there are so many confounding variables?

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antillean
It's worse than that. As the next paragraph says:

"The online data were collected in two stages. In the first stage, the
participants were recruited via several open internet discussion forums and
several student mailing lists. In this stage, data about religious and
paranormal beliefs, systemizing, mechanical abilities, and core ontological
confusions were collected. The rest of the data were collected 1.5 years
later. The recruitment message was sent by email to all individuals who had
participated in the first stage and who had given their email address for
participating in further studies (N= 1537). Of them, 237 could not be
contacted because of outdated email address, and 887 did not take part in the
present study."

So this is a self-selecting study: the initial group of 1537 (which was self-
selected) was whittled down (largely through self-selection) to the final 258
on whom the results are based. Further to that, the authors gave no
information on which of the "several open internet discussion forums and
several student mailing lists" they recruited or how they did that
recruitment. And they made no comparison between the demographic makeup of
their sample and the general Finnish population. (Probably because it would've
counted against the validity of the study since, y'know, Finland isn't 63%
female or 44% students.)

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cbanek
A little off topic, but even non-religious people have problems understanding
basic science concepts. One of my favorite examples is:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo)

Basically, even Harvard graduates have problems and misunderstandings with
basic concepts like the seasons.

While there's a lot of possible reasons for this, the one that I think is
relevant here is that if you don't ask the questions, and already believe you
know the answers, you are likely to not learn the appropriate facts, but
rather continue to believe your mistaken views.

This could be taken to an extreme in religion, because really the answer to
everything is God. So what need would there be for actual answers or
understanding?

