I love OkTrends. If I owned a dating site, I too would view it as hundreds of thousands of data points ready to be analyzed in amusing ways. In their newest article, they looked at the correlation between religiosity and writing proficiency, as measured by the Coleman-Liau Index.
Hm, interesting indeed. Or as they quipped, “Is there a Comic Sans version of the Bible?”
But even more interesting is when you break it down by how serious users report their belief to be:
“Note that for each of the faith-based belief systems I’ve listed, the people who are the least serious about them write at the highest level. On the other hand, the people who are most serious about not having faith (i.e. the “very serious” agnostics and atheists) score higher than any religious groups.”
And those not serious Buddhists? Totally non-theists who just want something more fancy and enlightened to call themselves. Who doesn’t know one of those types of college Buddhists?
Now, let’s remember that correlation does not imply causation. Poor writing skills don’t necessarily make you religious (poor reading skills, maybe). Religiosity doesn’t necessarily make you a poor writer (unless you worship the LOLCat Bible). If I had to propose a hypothesis, it’s likely intelligence is one of the determining factors for both religiosity and writing ability.
Of course, this is the blog from a dating site, not a peer reviewed scientific study, so take it with a grain of salt. Still interesting, though.
