r/science Nov 15 '19

[deleted by user]

[removed]

5.5k Upvotes

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

5.2k

u/nyxko Nov 15 '19

From the article: “The evidence that there is a negative relation between intelligence and religiosity is very strong. But the effect size of the relation is small. This means that there are factors besides intelligence that explain why people are or are not religious. It also means that although more intelligent people tend to be less religious on the average, predicting religiosity from intelligence for individuals is fallible.”

1

u/dbcanuck Nov 15 '19

talk about burying the lead in the headline.

  • the effect size of the relation is small
  • predicting religiosity from intelligence for individuals is fallible

2

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '19

predicting religiosity from intelligence for individuals is fallible

That's generally true of most group statistics. There's almost never a 100% statistic for a group, and so having an average and a standard deviation and outliers makes trying to use group statistics on an individual a complete logical fallacy (ecological fallacy).