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GameOver22 on 15 December 2012
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dsgrue3 said:
GameOver22 said:

Do you have the wrong study? I mean the article is interesting, but its not discussing anything you typed. Its looking at individuals within the US....not different countries.

"The current study sought to address each of these limitations.We utilized a large sample of mature US adults contacted by the MacArthur Foundation Survey of Midlife Development in the United States."

Edit: I'll also say that it would be interesting to see how their models perform if they controlled for fundamentalism in the other models (excluding the fundamentalists model). I would think that non-fundamentalist would be significantly different from other followers in terms of intelligence. I mean....when you just look at the fundamentalist model, there's  a significantly negative correlation between both IQ and education....a trait none of the other models exhibit when both variables are included in the model.

I'm pretty sure its been discussed to death too, but I have serious reservations about using IQ as a proxy for intelligence.

Weird. I guess I copied the wrong link. Source: http://www.slideshare.net/RatioExMachina/the-correlation-between-intelligence-and-belief

The quotation provided in my previous post was from the proper source but the link was not. I apologize for that. =)

I agree that non-fundamentalists would have different IQs, I would assume higher IQs from fundamentalists. Or do you mean non-fundamentalists per belief?

You're welcome to your reservations, but it's a tried and true process that is adapted to reflect advances in education to control an accurate average and measure. I mean, do you have examples where IQ has proven entirely inaccurate or what? I guess I just don't understand why you have your reservation. I'd love to hear more if you want?

About fundamentalist: I would actually think fundamentalists have lower IQs and lower levels of education, as the research suggests. What I mean, is that I think the other models would produce different results if fundamentalism was included as a control variable because I would expect there is a reason to think that fundamentalist religious believers and non-fundamentalist religious believers  are quite distinct from each other.....meaning the results for the correlation between intelligence and religious belief might be different if you exclude fundamentalists from the sample.

About IQ level: In the study, IQ level measures intelligence....not education. I didn't look at the operationalization of education, but education is usually accounted for by a simple question (what is the highest grade level you completed?).

My problem with IQ is that it doesn't really measure knowledge about religion. I'm more familiar with work in political science, but knowledge is not measured with IQ. It is measured with how much knowledge someone possesses about politics (typically questions with an objectively right answer). I would think the same should be applied to religious studies. IQ just captures how well someone can take a specific test.....it doesn't capture whether someone has seriously contemplated and investigated religious belief. I just think intelligence should be tied to intelligence about the topic at hand. It would kind of be like using how well people score on a math test as a proxy for intelligence in a political science study. I just don't see the connection.

Edit: For instance, I would use the "need for cognition" scale, which measures how much people enjoy problems that make them think, rather than an IQ test.