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

Florian Dürlinger and Jakob Pietschnig

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 2, 1-28

Abstract: 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

Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0262699

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262699

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