John Hawks points me to a “He said, she said,” piece which wonders whether there is an inverse relationship between belief in the paranormal and religion. The basic thesis is that the mind abhors a vacuum so without institutionally guided supernatural beliefs people simply revert to “default” intuitions. The article doesn’t come to any conclusion, citing contradictory results. So of course I decided to look at the GSS. Specifically, two variables, ASTROSCI and SCITEST3, which query how scientific individuals believe astrology to be. I paired them up with belief in God, GOD, highest degree attained, DEGREE, and correct number of vocabulary words, WORDSUM. Since people complain about the GSS’s ghetto graphs I just reformatted them into an HTML table. You can see the raw proportions below. After the fact I was curious about political orientation, POLVIEWS, and noted that liberals were more likely to accept astrology as scientific than conservatives. In any case, I found
1) Only a mild correlation between lack of god belief and skepticism of astrology
2) Stronger correlation between intelligence (vocabulary) and degree attainment and skepticism
ASTROSCI – "Astrology is scientific" | |||||||
Very | Sort of | Not at all | |||||
God | |||||||
Don’t believe | 7 | 30.6 | 62.3 | ||||
No way to found out | 3.7 | 17.1 | 79.2 | ||||
Some higher power | 5.2 | 27.3 | 67.5 | ||||
Believe sometimes | 9.3 | 21.8 | 68.9 | ||||
Believe but doubts | 3.7 | 29.2 | 67.0 | ||||
Know god exists | 4.7 | 28.1 | 67.3 | ||||
Degree | |||||||
< High school | 9.8 | 44.4 | 45.8 | ||||
High school | 6.1 | 31.2 | 62.7 | ||||
Junior college | 1.8 | 22.8 | 75.3 | ||||
Bachelor | 2.4 | 16.9 | 80.7 | ||||
Graduate | 0.3 | 12.2 | 87.5 | ||||
Wordsum (Vocab) | |||||||
0 | 14.3 | 29.1 | 56.6 | ||||
1 | 11.7 | 32.8 | 55.5 | ||||
2 | 9.0 | 51.9 | 39.1 | ||||
3 | 10.7 | 31.4 | 57.9 | ||||
4 | 0.6 | 40.7 | 58.6 | ||||
5 | 3.8 | 35.2 | 61 | ||||
6 | 6.1 | 26.2 | 67..6 | ||||
7 | 4.5 | 18.4 | 77.1 | ||||
8 | 2.9 | 17.9 | 79.1 | ||||
9 | 0 | 18.8 | 81.2 | ||||
10 | 0 | 14.3 | 85.7 | ||||
SCITEST3 – "Astrology has some scientific truth" | |||||||
Definitely | Probably | Probably not | Definitely not | ||||
God | |||||||
Don’t believe | 15.3 | 26.7 | 19.1 | 38.9 | |||
No way to found out | 6.3 | 30.8 | 30.6 | 32.3 | |||
Some higher power | 10.2 | 30 | 31.7 | 28.1 | |||
Believe sometimes | 11.6 | 38.7 | 31.8 | 17.9 | |||
Believe but doubts | 7.9 | 41.6 | 29.7 | 20.9 | |||
Know god exists | 10.0 | 45.5 | 22.5 | 21.9 | |||
Degree | |||||||
< High school | 15.7 | 53.5 | 18.9 | 12.0 | |||
High school | 9.9 | 46.8 | 24.4 | 18.9 | |||
Junior college | 10.1 | 33.1 | 27.2 | 29.6 | |||
Bachelor | 7.3 | 29 | 29.6 | 34.1 | |||
Graduate | 3.2 | 26.1 | 29.5 | 41.1 | |||
Wordsum (Vocab) | |||||||
0 | 30.6 | 69.4 | 0 | 0 | |||
1 | 31.9 | 49.7 | 4.6 | 13.7 | |||
2 | 24.1 | 50.5 | 19.6 | 5.8 | |||
3 | 9.2 | 64.8 | 21.1 | 4.9 | |||
4 | 13.9 | 55.1 | 17.1 | 13.9 | |||
5 | 10.8 | 52.8 | 22 | 14.4 | |||
6 | 7.5 | 46.1 | 24.5 | 21.9 | |||
7 | 8.8 | 37.7 | 30 | 23.5 | |||
8 | 8.9 | 22.4 | 36.2 | 32.5 | |||
9 | 5.3 | 26.5 | 26.2 | 42 | |||
10 | 0.6 | 19.3 | 36.7 | 43.4 | |||
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