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Comment by Erik816 | Hacker News Reader

Only 19% think they are more religious than average. I find that very interesting. Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.

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Theoretically it could also reflect the society. If 80% of people aren’t religious at all, then at most 20% are more religious than average.

It's been a while since this was updated (2014), but it indicates that over 50% of people consider religion "very important" in their life. Only 11% said religion was "not at all important."

So while you could imagine a society where 80% of people believe they aren't religious at all, the United States at least does not appear anywhere near that number.

https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/importanc...

Is this website primarily polling Americans?

(You’re probably right anyways - there’s a reason I put ‘theoretically’ at the beginning of my first post)

> Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.

It could also be that the (loose, intuitively approximated) mode on some level of granularity (the individual category perceived as most commonly seen) rather than the median is going to frequently be the intuitive yardstick for “average”, rather than median (mean of a ordinal categorical trait with no unique obvious reduction to an interval-level measure has no coherent definition, so its not really a candidate average.)

Yeah, this one is pretty easily explained as a statistical artifact in this way. The more religious someone is, the more time they are likely to spend around other religious people (at church, with friends met via church, various knock on effects of these things). As you become more religious, this effect will tend to increase your estimate of the population's average religiosity.

This also explains a number of political effects, especially once you start looking for it in other high time commitment social activities.

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