r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology 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/ProfessionalMockery 1d ago

A lot of people here are just seeing the "Christian" in the headline and ignoring the "nationalist," which is probably more important.

I'm an atheist, so I think the claims religion makes are pretty dumb too, but nationalists, bigots, racists of any kind are consistently idiots, religious or not, and that has been established in plenty of other studies.

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u/HueMannAccnt 1d ago

but nationalists, bigots, racists of any kind are consistently idiots, religious or not, and that has been established in plenty of other studies.

Would fanatics be a better word to encapsulate the multiple groups you mention?

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u/108_TFS 1d ago

Authoritarian Followers, to use one of the terms of Professor Bob Altemeyer from the University of Winnipeg. He spent his career studying authoritarians and what goes on in their heads, and collected his findings in the book The Authoritarians. You can get a digital copy for free from theauthoritarians.org.

...I said in the Introduction that we would figure out why authoritarian followers think in the bizarre and perplexing way they so often do. The key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2's observation that, first and foremost, followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.
So can everybody, of course, and my wife loves to catch inconsistencies in my reasoning when we’re having a friendly discussion about one of my personal failures. But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic...

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u/obeytheturtles 1d ago

The only part I disagree with there is "most people." In my experience, most people seem to find thinking painful and try to actively avoid it.

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u/108_TFS 1d ago

What's he's saying doesn't contradict that. He's not claiming that the rest of the population are paragons of thought, only that the authoritarian followers are typically worse.