Religious people find it harder to understand the world – study

[John V]

I would say it's an interesting study...but you can only read the first page without paying.

Here's another article about the study which goes more in-depth and raises some problems.

But my second and main concern is the fact that the physical capability factor included, and appears to be substantially driven by, the measure of mentality/henkinen.

Participants were asked to rate concepts like “consciousness” or “clock” as more or less mental, defined here as “anything that has some kind of spirit, or something which itself is mental”. When participants assigned any mentality to items like flowers, rocks, and wind, this contributed to their receiving a poorer “physical capability” factor, just as occurred when they mismatched two images on the mental rotation test.

But these aren’t the same sorts of things. Even putting aside that some botanists posit plant intelligence, thinking that rocks are mental is not a factual mistake, it’s a belief, just like a belief in God or astrology (and it’s a belief, lest we forget, which has a philosophical pedigree and that may be enjoying a resurgence.)