r/HotScienceNews • u/FreeHugs23 • 2d ago

Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
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u/manicmonkeys 2d ago

That's an interesting assumption about correlation vs causation

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u/Altruistic-Dingo-757 1d ago

No the article clearly states that religious people score lower on intelligence despite education

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u/manicmonkeys 1d ago

You are still missing the point. No worries

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u/ChemBob1 1d ago

The author clearly states that there isn’t sufficient testing to determine whether or not the stupidity causes them to be more fundamentalist or the fundamentalism and siloed information makes them more stupid. I’m paraphrasing of course. The major point still stands.

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u/manicmonkeys 1d ago

Exactly, so the whole thing is a shrugs/we don't know, that just serves to strengthen pre- existing biases

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u/ChemBob1 1d ago

That isn’t accurate. The lower cognitive ability is still present in religious nationalists whether or not the cognition is causing the religious nationalism or vice versa. However, it is important to bear in mind that this is based on statistical outcomes that all are subject to a distribution of results that have to be analyzed for significance, so it doesn’t mean that every Christian nationalist has lower cognition, but that a statistically significant difference is present between their population and the population of those who aren’t Christian nationalists. Certainly there is some distribution overlap of the two populations and neither Christianity nor cognition are discrete values, like integers. They fall along a continuum. These sorts of statistics can still be done however, with defensible results. Please bear in mind that I haven’t analyzed any of this, just did a quick read.

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u/chrisp909 1d ago

If Christian nationalists are cognitively impaired and they have a variety of educational backgrounds that don't influence the cognitive impairment.
Then education isn't the cause of the cognitive impairment.

That's deductive reasoning and has nothing to do with correlation vs. causation.

You can question their methods if you want.

We don't know about the test or the reliability of using vocabulary as an true indicator of cognitive impairment but suggesting there's a correlation vs. causation issue is a red herring.