Atheists or Christians—Which Group is More Common Among Those With Fairly High IQ Scores?

By Jim Lindgren
Jim Lindgren is a law professor at Northwestern University, with a BA from Yale and a JD and a PhD in (quantitative) sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cofounder of the Section on Scholarship of the Association of American Law Schools and a former chair of its Section on Social Science and the Law.
August 1 at 8:31 AM

A few days ago, there was a flap over an erroneous question on a quiz given to students at Ohio State University. I want to make two points:

1. None of the answers to the quiz question are correct. The suggested correct answer is not even the most likely to be true among the set of wrong answers.

2. Atheists do score slightly higher than Christians on IQ-derived vocabulary tests (the equivalent of about 2.9 IQ points in the 2006-2012 General Social Surveys) and on IQ-derived analogy tests (the equivalent of about 3.8 IQ points in the 1996 General Social Survey). But social psychologists ignore differences that are as large or larger perhaps because they do not fit their political narratives.

The Quiz

According to Campus Reform (noted at Daily Caller), an Ohio State University psychology quiz asked the following question: