The problem of religion
Fuente
We already knew, after analyzing 63 studies to the resepcto, that the belief in God is associated with lower scores in the IQ tests. It is true that there are very intelligent religious people, but on average, it is not so.
Now, a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology adds to this idea and tries to explain the reason for it.
The problem of religion
It is well established that religiosity correlates inversely with intelligence, but we still do not know very well the reason behind it.
In addition, knowing it could be something important for future generations, because it seems that the proportion of people with religious beliefs is growing: by 2050, if current trends continue, people who say they are not religious will make up only 13% of the population world.
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What can we do to prevent humanity from becoming collectively less intelligent? Is it because it embraces religion or embraces religion because it is less intelligent?
Such everything is not so disastrous, after all. According to the study mentioned, perhaps religious people tend to rely more on intuition. Therefore, instead of having a general intelligence deteriorated, they could be comparatively poor only in tasks in which intuition and logic conflict, and this could explain the lower results of the IQ test.
To test this hypothesis, the study researchers surveyed more than 63,000 people online and were asked to complete a set of 12 30-minute cognitive tasks that measured planning, reasoning, attention and working memory. The participants also indicated whether they were religious, agnostic or atheist.
As predicted, atheists generally performed better than religious participants, even after controlling for demographic factors such as age and education. Agnostics tended to place themselves among atheists and believers in all tasks. However, although religious respondents performed worse in general tasks that required reasoning, there were only very small differences in working memory. The issues where you had to put aside intuition and only use deductive reasoning were also the worst for believers (which may also explain why scientists embrace religion less).
If, as this new study suggests, religious belief predisposes people to rely more on intuition in decision-making, and the stronger their belief, the more pronounced is the impact of this dependence, what is the result of this? the daily life of the people? At the moment, there is no data about it. But in theory, perhaps cognitive training could allow religious people to maintain their beliefs without trusting too much in intuition when it conflicts with logic in everyday decision-making.
It would be a kind of intermediate way: on the one hand we respect the irrational beliefs of people and, at the same time, we reinforce the cognitive weaknesses associated with that belief. Naturally, for those who may feel offended, one important point must be stressed: it is irrelevant whether or not God exists to contemplate this social change. What we should fight is simply the perverse cognitive effects of defending, in the face of a lack of evidence, irrational beliefs, whether in God or in unicorns.