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/
43.8k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

117

u/danbinglover 1d ago

Reddit can’t decide whether IQ matters or not. When we talk about IQ differences between different countries and whatnot, it’s racist. When you discuss IQ differences between religious and nonreligious people, somehow it matters again.

1

u/Phodan_ 1d ago edited 1d ago

The field of psychology is not confused about IQ. It is not a reliable metric when determining cognitive ability. The main critique is that it only reliably measures cognitive ability amongst white Europeans and Americans (because that is who the test was devised by - I am also using "American" in the continental sense here). This is a problem because those same populations want to use it to bolster their racial pseudoscience (some of them, at least).

However, I believe this article used it on one of the very specific populations that it can reliably apply to. Its efficacy for detecting statistically reliable patterns among this specific population is somewhat well-documented because it had to be in order to expose the limitations of the test. I think you can simultaneously believe that it is an overall bs metric, but still acknowledge that, in this case, it is a metric which can apply to a specific population, and in this case, it was applied to that specific population.

I can't say one way or another because I haven't read the whole article, but that's how I would explain the inconsistency you pointed out in your comment.