Intelligence and Religiosity among Dating Site Users

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper replicates the well-established finding that here is a negative relationship between reported religious belief/ identity and the construct of cognitive ability.

I’m a bit confused on why this manuscript is being considered. It has one clear finding that has been shown extensively in previous literature. Further finding has even been shown with this exact data set and with similar analysis, as noted by the authors (Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016). So, I struggle to see the reason it should be published. However, this is so obvious, I perhaps am not clear on the editor’s intentions.

I would push the authors to try and find novel content above and beyond this effect. Given that this data set comes from a data site, perhaps there is something notable about the kinds of individuals that they are matched with or are seeking, the way they choose to signal aspects of themselves, etc.

I think there would need to be some novel aspect to this manuscript to warrant publication.

Author Response

Thank you for your review.

This response will be point-by-point. 

- It has one clear finding that has been shown extensively in previous literature.

To our knowledge, our exact finding has not been shown. Prior literature on this subject has looked at the relationship between the strength of belief, as measured by subjective evaluations of the dogmatism of a given religion, and cognitive ability, whereas ours included an actual measure of strength of belief. Moreover, we assessed whether these relationships were due to demographic confounding by restricting our main result to self-identified white individuals and then broadening it to include all groups, finding substantially the same result in both cases.

We then assessed models in which a factor score based on the religiousness items was predicted by cognitive ability, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and national origin, which illustrated that the relationship between cognitive ability and religiousness was largely unaltered by the inclusion of these other variables. Moreover, this showed that relative to heterosexual females, all other sexual orientation and sex combinations were less likely to be religious. The opposite pattern relative to self-identified whites was observed for all other ethnicities. Judging by the large increment in model R², there may be country of origin effects. All of these are interesting and little-addressed correlates of religiosity which future research should investigate and which were not investigated in the original data release. 

We've updated the RPubs linked in the paper to include additional models that might be of more interest. 

- I would push the authors to try and find novel content above and beyond this effect. Given that this data set comes from a data site, perhaps there is something notable about the kinds of individuals that they are matched with or are seeking, the way they choose to signal aspects of themselves, etc.

We do not have data on the individuals which people matched with. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The submitted paper about Intelligence and Religiosity offers an interesting and original research that adds a piece more to the growing amount of academic literature aimed at assessing to what extent intelligence and religion are related.

There are some issues that in my opinion need to be better addressed. One regards the state of the ongoing discussion: in my opinion the introductory remarks and references do not reflect the current state of research and the nuances that have been added in the last years. One among the most discussed, regards the cognitive style, i.e. whether more religious people are rather intuitive or analytic, or in other words, they rely more on fast or slow thinking styles. It seems that general intelligence coefficients are not of great help when dealing with that issue. The same can be said about religious styles or forms, since here a big pluralism is quite obvious, and it appears as little informative to put in the same container styles which look more for illumination and styles more prone on magic and ritualistic forms.The study accounts for certainty levels, which is very helpful, but I wonder whether the used data allow for something more.

Another difficulty is that the method description does provide scarce information about the items that were used in that extensive questionnaire to asses intelligence levels, something which does not help to understand the extent and meaning of the described correlations.

It is then clear that chat sites are often 'cheat sites', and there is a bunch of research showing evidence to the degree people deceive in those settings, rendering their data quite unreliable (like in the cases of age and income), something the authors state in their discussion section.

It is important to take into account to what extent those websites configure an own sub-culture, and people that resort to them are not exactly representative of the overall population, but have some distinctive traits.

I think however that the paper has great potential and offers very interesting data. I just recommend to consider some other related issues, and to control for some additional variables, like personality factors - probably related - and social levels, like academic and economic (with all the reserves). Then, some scholars have pointed out that religion works as a mating marker, especially for several groups, and even plays a role in sexual selection (Feierman). If this is true, the interest to show one's own religiosity could be related to mating strategies, something that relativizes the reliability of self-testimonies in this case.

I am convinced the authors can use this opportunity to dig deeper in that big data set, and to provide more interesting insights into the very complex world of mating, religion and cognitive style.

Author Response

Thank you for your review. 

 

We added the cognitive test questions, a note about the sample being selected since it came from a dating site and possible alternative explanations, and we included additional models in the RPubs link. 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

* It has one clear finding that has been shown extensively in previous literature.

To our knowledge, our exact finding has not been shown. Prior literature on this subject has looked at the relationship between the strength of belief, as measured by subjective evaluations of the dogmatism of a given religion, and cognitive ability, whereas ours included an actual measure of strength of belief. Moreover, we assessed whether these relationships were due to demographic confounding by restricting our main result to self-identified white individuals and then broadening it to include all groups, finding substantially the same result in both cases.

We then assessed models in which a factor score based on the religiousness items was predicted by cognitive ability, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and national origin, which illustrated that the relationship between cognitive ability and religiousness was largely unaltered by the inclusion of these other variables.

 

** Here are four papers that all use various self reported measures of religious belief and spirituality, and some control for a number of different demographic and personality factors.

Bertsch, S., & Pesta, B. J. (2009). The Wonderlic Personnel Test and elementary cognitive tasks as predictors of religious sectarianism, scriptural acceptance and religious questioning. Intelligence, 37(3), 231-237. Clark, R. (2004). Religiousness, spirituality, and IQ: Are they linked. Explorations: An Undergraduate Research Journal, 1(1), 35-46. Lewis, G. J., Ritchie, S. J., & Bates, T. C. (2011). The relationship between intelligence and multiple domains of religious belief: Evidence from a large adult US sample. Intelligence, 39(6), 468-472. Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition, 123(3), 335-346.

**So, one concern I have is that this work is apparently not known to the authors. Further, the measures in these papers are more specialized and fine grain for asking this question. So there needs to be some added value above and beyond this finding. 

**To the point of controls, I agree that splitting up the data by group category can be of value,  in-contrast to just controlling for the categories; but showing that white participants (who make up the vast majority of the research I'm citing here) is not informative. If you instead split the data up by demographic category, showing the result holds, that would be of greater value. 

Moreover, this showed that relative to heterosexual females, all other sexual orientation and sex combinations were less likely to be religious. The opposite pattern relative to self-identified whites was observed for all other ethnicities. Judging by the large increment in model R², there may be country of origin effects. All of these are interesting and little-addressed correlates of religiosity which future research should investigate and which were not investigated in the original data release. 

** Some of the previous work has also looked at individual difference across countries. And obviously a number of studies have done the country level analysis. So again, I think there needs to be something more. My comment below was not intended to be discouraging. I actually think this data set could have a really interesting set of variables that provide insight into what these people were seeking romantically or how these individuals were presenting themselves that could be added to the analysis and provide some really meaningful and exciting results. I encourage the authors to look back at that data set and see if there could be some comparisons that could show how those scoring higher or lower on their IQ measure look for other mates that very systematically on some interesting dimension. I know there is no "matching" data, but surely this data set can provide insight into i. the kinds of people each group was looking for; ii. the ways people were presenting themselves in any publicly observable answers they provided; iii. etc.

Author Response

>*To the point of controls, I agree that splitting up the data by group category can be of value,  in-contrast to just controlling for the categories; but showing that white participants (who make up the vast majority of the research I'm citing here) is not informative. If you instead split the data up by demographic category, showing the result holds, that would be of greater value. 


Done. We've added these to the supplement.

We're unable to address what people are looking for with the present data, so we hope our replication of the relationship between religiosity and a measure of cognitive ability and our investigation of the relationship between cognitive ability and religious certainty (which differs from fundamentalism), which we've found to be plausibly invariant by demographic subgroup, is worthy of publication. 

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for adding that content to the supplement. 

At this stage I will defer to the editor's wisdom on publication. 

Best of luck 

Author Response

Thank you very much. I appreciate your reviewing. We will respond to the editor's comments immediately.