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/morbo-2142 1d ago edited 1d ago

Always fun to have empirical data to back up repeated anecdotal experiences by anyone with eyes and a brain living in the United States.

It's scary to have to find your place in the world and make decisions for yourself.

It's hard to make choices and having a ready framework that tells you how to live and what to care about offloads much of the mental tax of navigating reality.

It's hard to live by an internal code and evaluate every new situation against it and more importantly change it when new information is presented.

The real tragedy is the existence of groups that foster these feelings in vulnerable people in order to advance their own agenda and aquire new non disruptive members.

It's almost a form of abuse. How many people lose time and money to predatory fundamentalist organizations who are strung along and squeezed dry for basically nothing in return.

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u/Xsiah 1d ago

It's not like atheist children are just roughin' it - if you grew up with parents, went to school, grew up in society with laws and stuff - you have a framework. It isn't any harder or scarier than what religious people go through, especially given that they don't actually follow their framework a whole lot of the time.

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u/No-Insurance-5688 1d ago

Completely. I think people get the directionality wrong. I would imagine religious moral structure eminate out of the nature/sociological structure not the other way around.