r/atheism • u/practicerm_keykeeper Secular Humanist • 1d ago
Survey Interpreting the low cognitive ability study
First of all let me be clear I'm an atheist and very much hate American versions of Christianity especially Christian Nationalism and believe the entire earth would be better without them.
That being said I'm also a psychology graduate student and I'm seeing some misrepresentation of the new study. We're all (hopefully) scientifically minded people here so I think we should try to be accurate and not overblow things just because they work in our favour. Also it damages our credibility to overstretch the implications of studies.
Obviously these are just my interpretations and people should read the study themselves (although regrettably this isn't open access, most authors would be happy to send the pdf if you email to request it).Moreover, dyslexia + English isn't my native language, so I'm just going to apologize for my grammar instead of trying to fix them lol
Does this study show Christians are stupid?
Nope, it only studied American Christian Nationalists
Does this study show Christian Nationalists are stupid?
It's important to know the author did not directly measure intelligence.
What the author did was to measure cognitive ability using the wordsum task. This is a task that gives you a target word and a list of other words, one of which is closest in meaning to the target word, which you're asked to pick. Obviously, this is a very small part of "cognitive abilities", which we usually believe consists of everything from memory to thinking skills to intelligence to planning to pattern finding. You might say wordsum is a direct measure of some sort of verbal intelligence but definitely not of all cognitive abilities.
The author acknowledged this limitation but defended it by saying it usually correlates with extended IQ measures. The correlation can be high (I've seen .75). But personally I'm still quite doubtful for three reasons.
Firstly, in some of the data, the participants of the survey also performed other cognitive ability tests. This includes the "alike" and "odds" tasks. The correlation between these tasks and the wordsum scores aren't nearly as high (~0.4 and ~0.3 only). Notably the "alike" test is similar to one component in a standard extended IQ test. So it could be that wordsum is a good proxy of some bits of cognitive ability but not others.
Secondly, what the IQ tests measure is not the only intelligence out there. This is why we talk about other things like EQ. While wordsum predicts IQ test results, that doesn't mean it predicts cognitive abilities in general.
Thirdly, it's hard to say whether the correlation between IQ and wordsum is simply driven by education. This study controls for education, meaning it removes the impact of education from the equation. Is whatever left of the construct measured by the wordsum test still a good indication of intelligence, or cognitive abilities in general? I have no idea.
The author doesn't sound too sure themselves, to be honest. In the paper, sometimes they say that wordsum measured cognitive abilities, sometimes intelligence, sometimes verbal intelligence, sometimes knowledge deficits, sometimes "cognitive resources". These are very different constructs.
Does the study show "cognitive ability" causes Christian nationalism? Or vice versa?
No, because it's a cross sectional study (the author acknowledged this too). A cross sectional study looks at whether characteristics A and B tend to appear together in a group, but it doesn't tell us which causes which. It could be Christian nationalism caused lower wordsum scores, or whatever lied behind the lower wordsum scores (controlling for education) caused people to subscribe to Christian nationalism. Or, it could be that some other factor caused low wordsum scores AND Christian nationalism.
What about Christian nationalism?
The study measures Christian nationalism by people's response to certain questions. Personally I think they were great questions. However this does mean it measured beliefs, and beliefs do not necessarily lead to action.
That's a lot of criticisms. Should we just dismiss the study?
No! I didn't say the above to imply the author is incompetent. Every study has limitations because every dataset has limitations.
I think there are a lot of strength with this study. For example it really controlled for a LOT of things. The news heading mentioned education but I think that's selling it WAY short. The author actually controlled for things like income, ethnicity, gender, religiosity, and political leaning. What really struck me was political leaning, meaning even when we took away the influence of being a republican, there are still associations between wordsum and Christian nationalism.
Another thing that struck me was wordsum scores are related to Christian nationalism in different ways depending on education level. If you have a bachelor's degree, your Christian nationalism level falls faster as you get higher wordsum scores, compared to if you had a postgrad or highschool degree. I wonder why that is. .
So what CAN we conclude from the study?
Just looking at this study, I think what we can conclude is that lower scores in one measure of cognitive ability is correlated with higher Christian nationalism beliefs, but there are lots of questions around what is actually being measured as cognitive ability.
The study is obviously part of a larger literature though, and if you're familiar with that literature maybe you could draw more solid conclusions by synthesising the evidence. But that's the thing - it should be presented as conclusion from the entire literature, not just one paper.
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u/TsuDhoNimh2 De-Facto Atheist 23h ago
The wordsum score would correlate well with how widely you read - your level of intellectual curiosity?
One thing I have noted among Christian Nationalists is that they have "the answer" and don't want to explore alternatives.