信仰原來會影響智商，研究發現：「無神論者」聰明很多！
清新樂園 2018-02-01 11:36:45
許多人都有自己的宗教信仰，對有信仰的人來說是心靈上的寄託，只是你相信信仰和智商也會有所關連嗎？多年來許多研究團隊想要找出宗教與智商之間的聯繫，只是從沒得出結論過；只是最近西方卻有一項研究聲稱，他們有找出結果了！
這份發表於《Frontiers In Psychology》期刊的研究表示，西方無神論者比有一神宗教信仰的人更加聰明，其中指出由於宗教人員很多時候都是依靠著直覺，因此傾向於比較不聰明的。
研究人員解釋他們調查了超過6.3萬人，並分類他們是無神論者、有信仰者或不可知論者，這些人被要求在30分鐘內完成一系列的認知問題；這項測試考驗了參與者們的記憶力、專注力、規劃性和推論能力，而這樣比對起來後，他們發現無神論者的表現更好，再來是不可知論者，最後才是有信仰者。
他們更說，整體結果顯示對於宗教信仰越強烈的人，認知能力的表現就越差。其中最讓他們驚訝的是兩者在記憶力方面的差異很小，但是推論方面就有很大的差距；研究人員總結認為，當直覺和邏輯出現了衝突的時候，那些有信仰的人智商就會呈現比較低的狀況。
倫敦帝國學院的理查 (Richard Daws) 和亞當 (Adam Hampshire) 就寫下他們的發現，大家已經篤定認為宗教信仰和智力是成反比的，這種相關性反映了直覺性解決問題上的行為偏差，這會造成直覺和推論出現衝突時，就會有錯誤存在。
他們透過兩個大型互聯網的群組來分析數據和這些假設，而最後報告指出無神論者在推論方面的能力的確超過有信仰者；他們也相信宗教信仰的影響和一些社會因素有關，包括年齡、教育和出生國家等等。也許這樣的研究還需要更多時間去證實，但是在這方面卻也是一個很大的進展。
Religious people are, on average, less intelligent than atheists, researchers claim.
With the number of people with a religious belief on the rise – it’s predicted that people with no faith will make up only 13 per cent of the global population by 2050 – numerous studies have explored the relationship between religious convictions and IQ.
And now, in a new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers say that diminished intelligence among people of faith could be because they largely rely on intuition.
“It is well established that religiosity correlates inversely with intelligence,” note Richard Daws and Adam Hampshire at Imperial College London.
Surveying more than 63,000 participants online who indicated whether they were atheists, religious or agnostic, each person had to complete a 30-minute set of 12 cognitive tasks that measured planning, reasoning, attention and memory.
Overall, the research found that atheists performed better overall than the religious participants even when demographic factors like age and education were taken into consideration. Agnostics mostly placed between atheists and believers on all tasks.
While strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive performance, the data did show that there were only few small differences in working memory compared to tasks that required reasoning.
Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since'
As such, rather than having poor general intelligence, the researchers say that religious people's lower IQ test results may be a result of bad performance on tasks only where intuition and logic come into conflict.
In fact, one of the reasoning tasks which was a difficult version of the Stroop Task known as “colour-word remapping”, was designed to create maximum conflict between an intuitive response and a logical one.
As predicted, this task showed the biggest group differences in keeping with the idea that religious people rely more on their intuition.
“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,” the researchers concluded.
