Meta-analyzing intelligence and religiosity associations: Evidence from the multiverse

Autor(en)

Florian Dürlinger, Jakob Pietschnig

Abstrakt

Over the past century, a remarkable body of research about the relationship of intelligence and religiosity has accumulated. So far, the majority of studies that investigated this relationship showed a negative correlation, indicating lower cognitive abilities of individuals reporting stronger religious beliefs. Although the effect direction has been observed to be largely consistent across studies, the reported effect strength varied substantially across studies. Several potentially moderating variables such as different intelligence and religiosity assessment methods, educational status of samples, and participant sex have been proposed as likely candidates for explaining systematic differences in effect strengths. However, the effects of these moderators are to date unclear. Consequently, we focused in investigating effects of these moderating variables on the intelligence and religiosity link in an update of prior meta-analytical investigations in n = 89 (k = 105; N = 201,457) studies. Random-effects analyses showed a small but robust negative association between intelligence and religiosity r = -.14 (p < .001; 95% CI [-.17, -.12]). Effects were stronger for (i) psychometric intelligence tests than for proxy measures such as grade point averages and (ii) general population and college samples than pre-college samples. Moreover, we provide evidence from combinatorial, multiverse, and specification curve analyses that further corroborates the robustness of the investigated association. Out of 192 reasonable specifications all 135 (70.4%) significant summary effects were negative. In all, our results show small but robust negative associations between religiosity and intelligence that are differentiated in strength but generalize in terms of direction over moderating variables.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Psychologie der Entwicklung und Bildung

Journal

PLoS ONE

Band

17

Anzahl der Seiten

28

ISSN

1932-6203

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262699

Publikationsdatum

02-2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501004 Differentielle Psychologie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

General

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/metaanalyzing-intelligence-and-religiosity-associations-evidence-from-the-multiverse(78de218e-fc86-4e7c-83f6-baa99d65870d).html