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Are religious people really less smart, on average,

than atheists?

As predicted, the atheists performed better overall than the religious participants,

even after controlling for demographic factors like age and education. Agnostics
tended to place between atheists and believers on all tasks.

In fact, strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive

performance.

However, while the religious respondents performed worse overall on tasks that
required reasoning, there were only very small differences in working memory.

Also, some of the reasoning tasks, such as an extra-hard version of the Stroop

Task known as “colour-word remapping”, had been designed to create maximum
conflict between an intuitive response and a logical one.

The biggest group differences emerged on these tasks, consistent with the idea

that religious people rely more on their intuition.

In contrast, for a complex reasoning task – “deductive reasoning” – for which
there were no obviously intuitive answers, there was much less of a group

difference.

Daws and Hampshire concluded: “These findings provide evidence in support of
the hypothesis that the religiosity effect relates to conflict [between reasoning and

intuition] as opposed to reasoning ability or intelligence more generally.”

If, as this work suggests, religious belief predisposes people to rely more heavily
on intuition in decision-making – and the stronger their belief, the more

pronounced the impact – how much of a difference does this make to actual
achievement in the real world?

At the moment, there’s no data on this. But in theory, perhaps cognitive training

could allow religious people to maintain their beliefs without over-relying on
intuition when it conflicts with logic in day to day decision-making.